I work from home and do video editing and photo editing. Matching that, I have a very powerful computer at home. I also like to play games like Skyrim or the Witcher in between. Because it just doesn't make sense for me to buy a separate PC for games, I bought several hard drives to separate work from pleasure. Now I have connected a 4K monitor for work, a Full HD monitor from Acer for games that my PC does not pack in 4K and a 4: 3 monitor for performance monitoring at work and while playing. Of course, I could always do that on the respective unused monitor, but pushing the windows around would be more trouble. Because my office is also a guest room for (very rare) visits, there's also a bed in the room with an approx. 4 year old television. My thought was now to fix the TV with a wall bracket (which I also have here) to the wall above the middle monitor and to connect it to the fourth and last connection of my graphics card so that I can watch Netflix and Co. From the guest bed. So if four monitors are permanently connected to my graphics card (one 2080), does that deteriorate the performance when working and playing? I can well imagine that the rendering of photos and videos, which is mainly at the expense of the CPU, is not affected as much. But when you play it is something different, isn't it? Some games are not always running smoothly in 4K, could that make it worse or are the other screens not noticeable?
Roughly speaking: yes.
Your PC naturally consumes more power to display something on four screens than on just one screen.
Only with a 2080 can I imagine that the drop in performance is not that big.
If you edit images at the same time, play games in HD and watch Netflix while "performance monitoring" is running on a monitor (whatever that may be), your graphics card will require it. If you connect a 1080 screen that is turned off, the driver software should take this into account and not waste any resources on this monitor. This can be easily checked by trying to drag the mouse to the switched-off monitor: if it works, it will also be supplied.
but pushing the windows around would be more trouble
That could be done by script.
If you want to know exactly, you can simply try it out. Play your game and see the frame rate. Then connect the other monitors the way you want it (on or off or whatever) and measure again. It couldn't be more precise.
Not really.
If nothing sophisticated is rendered on the monitors, the graphics card is hardly burdened.
Of course, if you gamble on everyone at the same time, it is more of a burden than if you gamble on one, it is clear.
