   Dual Radeon/nVidia Cards?
  Hiya,I need to test some applications on both nVidia and ATI Radeon cards. Has anyone had any experience running a PC with cards from these two vendors installed at the same time? Or would you recommend just running two different machines?Any thoughts would be appreciated [smile]Cheers,James   
  If you have both sets of drivers installed it's pretty easy to just shut down your system and swap them out whenever needed.  That's what I do anyway.Trying to get both working at once just seems like asking for trouble. :)   ;  I haven't tried it myself, but I have heard of people doing it - there was even a hack around the net to let you render with your ATI card, and run PhysX on your NVidia card in the same application at the same time [wink]   ;  Thanks for your replies folks :)I don't need to run both cards simultaneously, just be able to switch between them. I'm sure it'll be fine to do one set of tests, swap the cards over and do another. Thanks for the tip.ratings++   ;  XP only allows one video driver to be active at any given time, so you're out of luck there. Vista's driver model should support multiple drivers from different vendors at once, but I don't think that's been used much in practice. I know its one of the features being touted for Windows 7 though.Your best bet is to switch out cards, or better yet, to have a different PC with the alternate card available for testing... but you're going to have to uninstall the old card, swap the new one in, install all the software, etc... its going to be a huge pain. You can't simply leave both in the case and choose between them at start-up because windows will recognize that the hardware is there and try to install it.I'd really avoid frequent switching of video cards on a single machine, especially one used for real work. Windows doesn't really like to have it's major hardware components swapped frequently.   ;Quote:Original post by RavyneXP only allows one video driver to be active at any given time, so you're out of luck there.Nevertheless, it has been done before.   ;  Thanks.Hmm... that link looks interesting. I'll give it a try - not sure how well it'll work on Vista. If it's a no-go I guess the safest bet is to use another machine and fit a Radeon card, like you say Ravyne.   ;  I'm not sure whether it is a good idea to install drivers from both nVidia and Ati at the same time (even if both graphics cards aren't in the machine at the same time). People in gaming / graphics cards forums always advice to completely remove drivers using a driver cleaner, to remove old drivers from another vendor if you switch graphics cards (for example if you go from nvidia -> ati or the other way around).Some people even claim that to get the best performance and avoid problems, you'd better completely reinstall windows on the machine. However, I'm not sure whether they are exaggerating or they truly have a point.Perhaps, another option to be safe: what if you'd install a second hard drive in your computer with a fresh windows installation for the other graphics card? In that case, when you want to test: switch graphics cards in the machine, connect the other hard drive and you are safe. No intervening driver problems for sure. Perhaps you could even use an external hard drive for this and maybe you could put both graphics cards at the same time in the machine (but on your main windows installation you install drivers for graphics card A and disable graphics card B in the device manager, while for the testing windows installation on the external/second hard drive you install only the drivers for graphics card B and disable graphics card A).Maybe you wouldn't even need a second hard drive and just create a dual boot, both with windows XP/Vista (whatever you are using). I'm not sure whether dual boots are possible with two exactly the same windows versions.   ;Quote:Original post by RavyneVista's driver model should support multiple drivers from different vendors at once, but I don't think that's been used much in practice. I know its one of the features being touted for Windows 7 though.Vista's driver model (WDDM 1.0) explicately denies such a thing, which is why it's a major part of Win7 (WDDM 1.1).;  The setup I have at home is a Mac Pro running Windows XP using BootCamp, I have two graphics cards installed, NVidia 7300 (or so) and ATI 1900 (or so), setup for 3 screens. Works without any problem.I have not tried any games that runs multiple screens at the same time, that might give issues with DirectX and the drivers.