Using external monitor from laptop, Does it use put more burden on GPU while gaming?

My laptop spec is listed below and the monitor is also 1080p. Thanks

 

There shouldn't be a difference if the resolution is the same... unless you're trying to do dual monitors or something.

 

my laptop monitor usually have chrome open so I can read gamefaqs while playing if needed. So it shouldn't be much different I assume?

 

No if you are not really doing anything other than Chrome on your laptop's screen, it shouldn't put a lot more burden on your GPU. Obviously your GPU would need to render both frames but a browser's GUI is practically nothing compared to a moving image that needs to be rendered at 30fps or more like in a video game.

 

IIRC, GPUs (or more specfically GPU drivers) are designed to run games most optimally in single-monitor, full screen mode since that's how most people game. You might see a small performance hit from having a second display active while gaming, especially if you're using some form of windowed mode.

 

In my experience, the difference is negligible if you're running the game in full screen mode and the other monitor is displaying something like a browser page. The only instance where I can see it being a deal breaker is if the game is already at the limit if playability on a single monitor.

 

I think it depends on the driver and the setup, really.. I know radeon cards on an apu share resources in a way that might pick off shader time and ram bandwidth when running in dual mode.

My nvidia+optimus setup didn't have that problem, unless we were talking about some direct rendering, or one of those weird custom renderers when playing blu-ray, and so on.

But sure, if you have Chrome open and it runs a flash-plugin on the igp, while you're running a game on the dedicated card, it's going to get warmer. And potentially cause some slow-downs when that flash-plugin wants cpu-time. I'm mentioning that specifically, because flash has direct calls to system-components. Could suddenly lose focus on your game as well when the window manager croaks and tries to recover, that sort of thing.

Everything else, as long as it's indirectly controlled, can be set to, say, low priority and essentially disappear.