Game pauses if i select another screen

[vitoko1999]

Hello i wanted to ask if someone has any idea of why when im playing with my laptop and have another monitor on and for example im watching a video on one screen and playing a game on another when i launch a game it freezes my second monitor or app or whatever im doing and when i click on the second monitor it continues playing but freezes my game or my laptop monitor and its not only on steam it happens with any other game on other platforms.

[nullable]

What are your specs?

As a rough guess I'm assuming you have a gaming laptop with a discreet GPU. In most cases when not gaming your laptop is using an onboard iGPU, and when you run a game the laptop uses the GPU. And what happens is the iGPU is still being used, but it's being used as a passthrough to display the data coming from the GPU. IE GPU > iGPU > Monitors, which is a bit different than how desktops operate.

I imagine that may cause the iGPU to stop doing its normal work. So you'd have to make sure your GPU is doing multi-monitor display. If the iGPU isn't doing its normal work anymore, and the GPU isn't doing the work to render what's supposed to display on the second screen then that might explain the behavior you're seeing.

But that's like 50% a guess because I haven't used multiple monitors on a gaming laptop before so I haven't experienced the behavior or all possible behaviors. So I'm hypothiszing based on what you've described, and what I know.

This might be resolved with some additional configuration. But first thing's first. What are your system specs? What is your specific laptop model?

[vitoko1999]

Originally posted by nullable:

What are your specs?

As a rough guess I'm assuming you have a gaming laptop with a discreet GPU. In most cases when not gaming your laptop is using an onboard iGPU, and when you run a game the laptop uses the GPU. And what happens is the iGPU is still being used, but it's being used as a passthrough to display the data coming from the GPU. IE GPU > iGPU > Monitors, which is a bit different than how desktops operate.

I imagine that may cause the iGPU to stop doing its normal work. So you'd have to make sure your GPU is doing multi-monitor display. If the iGPU isn't doing its normal work anymore, and the GPU isn't doing the work to render what's supposed to display on the second screen then that might explain the behavior you're seeing.

But that's like 50% a guess because I haven't used multiple monitors on a gaming laptop before so I haven't experienced the behavior or all possible behaviors. So I'm hypothiszing based on what you've described, and what I know.

This might be resolved with some additional configuration. But first thing's first. What are your system specs? What is your specific laptop model?

My laptop is the MSI RAIDER GE78HX 13VI with 13th gen intel i9-13980HX 24/32, 64 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 16 GB