This has been talked about a lot of times, but as every topic about it is like at least a year old, I'm gonna start another one. Maybe something has changed, who knows.
I used to have PC with a GTX 1060 6GB, Ryzen 5 1600x and 16 GB RAM. On that PC, I was able to play games on the main monitor while watching things like YouTube/Twitch on the other one without having any issues. I am using the same monitors right now - the main one is running on 144 Hz and is connected via DisplayPort, while the 2nd one is running on 60 Hz via HDMI (it doesn't support DisplayPort).
However, now I have upgraded my PC to a RX 6700XT GPU, the Ryzen 5 7600x and 32 GB DDR5 RAM - and suddenly I can't watch videos while gaming anymore. FPS drop from ~144 to about 110 when something is moving on the 2nd monitor. When hiding the movement on the 2nd monitor, all FPS issues disappear. I am running on the latest drivers.
I have tried out all the common fixes you can find about this, but unfortunately, none of them seem to have helped. Is it even something that I can fix, or maybe a known driver problem or something? Do I really have to get another 144 Hz monitor and play without FreeSync? Will there not be screen tearing then?
I think I kind of fixed this, but it will not work for everyone, as it requires integrated graphics.
So what I did is - first of all notice that the Ryzen 5 7600x comes with integrated graphics! What I then tried is plugging my secondary monitor into the motherboard to make it run on the iGPU, kind of to seperate it from the actual GPU. It's not supposed to run things like games anyway, but just things like Discord, YouTube videos and so on. So just for fun, I plugged it into the motherboard.
And I don't know if this is a proper solution - but so far - everything is working flawlessly. No matter what I do on the second monitor, the first one is not impacted by it at all and I can finally enjoy 144 Hz gaming, while watching YouTube or anything else on the 60 Hz one.
I don't know if this comes with any other issues as I'm not really a PC guy, but if there's any downsides to this, please let me know. I hope this can help out someone else out there as well.
this was 5 months ago and i'm about to try this if possible, I'm having the same problem as you on my main monitor everything runs fine a bit choppy at times and the audio will cut out if i have youtube on my other 60Hz monitor as well as the youtube video stuttering and cutting out have tried everything.
"hardware acceleration" in Browsersettings on or off???
Off but on my old GPU it was capable of so much more even though it was a worse card than my current one. Doesn't make sense.
I have the exact same problem, and I also just switched the second monitor to iGPU to resolve the issue. I tried everything I could find on the internet and nothing helps, expect for just having one monitor plugged into the GPU. I have Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7900 XTX.
AMD, please fix