[win7] Bad quality when not on primary monitor or window has no focus

[Huib]

My situation is as follows:

What we have:

• a vizard window on one monitor (or actually on multiple monitors / HMD, but the problem also occurs on a single monitor)
• a graphical user interface on the other monitor (that interacts with vizard over a tcp connection)

The computer runs on Windows 7 with an nVidia Geforce GTX 680.

The problems
With vsync turned on and triple buffering turned off in the nvidia settings, we get the best results, but only when:

• vizard runs fullscreen on the primary display (that we set as primary in the windows settings)
• the vizard window has focus (when clicked outside the window, for instance somewhere on the GUI, we encounter the problems described below)

When one of these is not the case we get problems, especially when the image contains a lot of motion, which manifest differently, depending of Aero is turned on or off:

With Aero off: terrible tearing occurs (we also tried turning it on in vizard instead of the nvidia settings, with the same results).

With Aero on: movement is extremely choppy

Although the frame rate never drops below 60 FPS.

The solution (?)
To work around these problems, we tried the current setup:

• a matrox card (to get a single primary display)
• a dvi splitter (to be able to clone one of the HMD glasses)
• a seperate computer for the GUI to run on (so the vizard window can preserve focus)

As you might understand, we'd rather replace one of these hardware components by a software solution, so my question is:

Does anyone know of either a nicer solution for either the focus problem or the primary display problem? (or both )


P.S.
what we've already tried:

• running the GUI on the onboard intel GPU
• reducing the scene's polygons as much as possible
• set the maximum framerate to 60 FPS (by setting viz.max_frame_rate)