2 Monitors one graphics card and one onboard graphics Help

teknostorm

I have an Intel DH67BL motherboard with Intel HD Graphics and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750Ti graphics card, with 2 monitors.

I was running both monitors out of the Geforce card with nice results on both the interactive renderer and also on Octane render plugin. I setup my Carrara so that the interactive renderer is on one monitor while the sequencer/browser and properties on the other.

Problem was whenever I was rendering an animation for a few hours, the mouse would come to crawl and now allow me to do anything else like sending emails.

So I have connected one of the monitors to the Intel HD Graphics on my motherboard, and the other to the Nvidia card. (I suspect my motherboard does not allow 2 graphics card, so I cannot connect an extra card like others do.)

Now I can render the animation and the mouse movements on one monitor that is connected to the Nvidia card slows to a crawl, but everything is fine on the other monitor and I can work on my emails etc on that one just fine, and I can even open another instance of Carrara or an editing program and work on that.

Problem is, the interactive renderer is too slow now, whichever monitor I shift Carrara to. I have set up Interactive Renderer in preferences to use OpenGL, but I suspect it is using the Intel HD gpu instead of the Nvidia Geforce GTX.

Is there any way to force the interactive renderer to use the Nvidia card, or any other advise you can give to make interactive renderer fast?

evilproducer

Can you use the graphic card's control panel to override what Carrara wants to use?

I don't know if this will help, but it might: In the preferences under Imaging and Scratch Disk, try turning off Texture spooling. In the Interactive Renderer, you could try lowering the displayed texture map size and/or lower or turn off other display options, such as transparency.

teknostorm

Thanks evilproducer, but I just discovered the solution was something else.

In Windows 7 display settings the monitor connected to the motherboard display was Primary and the monitor connected to the graphics card was secondary. I changed the monitor connected to the graphics card to primary and Carrara (and all other 3d applications) started using the graphics card by default! Problem solved!

(btw Nvidia control panel does have the option to select which exe file will use the Graphics card, but even after choosing carrara.exe to use the Graphics card it did not. But switching the GPU monitor to primary did the trick).