ATI for work, Nvidia for gaming, both into 1 monitor???

[kinetiknz]

Hi there, I have an unusual problem which I'm looking to solve.

I currently have a FirePro V8700 workstation card (for my Maya work)
and I also have an Nvidia GTX 285

I play games often, and the Firepro (equiv to ati 4870) is just a bit too slow.

Does anyone know if I can have both the cards installed, AND both connected to the same monitor.

So basically, if I can somehow choose which card is currently active??

ati firepro - when I'm working
nvidia gtx - when I'm gaming

The best situation would be if the secondary card powered down also, to save on power, but I'm not too worried about that..


Anyone seen this done before?

 

[flyinfinni]

Well, I know that in Win 7 you can install multiple graphics drivers so you can have the drivers for both installed at the same time. Connecting them both and having them both hooked to the same monitor might be more difficult. The thing that I don't know how you would be able to use one to accelerate the games with one, and use the other for desktop use. Never seen it done and I'm not sure it would be worth the headaches of trying to figure it all out.

 

[kinetiknz]

Hmm yeah theres lots of unknowns. When you have 2 cards driving 2 outputs, do you still have 1 desktop? I guess if there is still 1 wide desktop, I can window a game and drag it onto the second monitor and fullscreen it, then it would be using the full power of the second gaming card.. in theory

 

[flyinfinni]

In Theory, but I'm not sure how running both cards at once on an extended desktop would work. Obviously, with windows you really only have 1 desktop, and I'm not sure how it would extend from 1 card to another in that respect.
I guess I'm probably not being much help, but just trying to think through what I would do if I was trying to run that setup.

 

[kinetiknz]

Hmm yeah. In a standard 2 card setup, if I drag an app halfway onto each monitor, does it use both cards to full effect, each drawing half the app? so in theory getting a different framerate on each half... sounds odd

 

[flyinfinni]

That does sound odd.. lol. I'm not sure how that works. Might be worth googling some of that type of stuff, you could even call ATI/Nvidia tech support or something, just to ask how multi-card extended display setups work.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

You can load both ATI and nVidia drivers on the same box under Windows 7.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-ATI-physx-patch-gpu,8786.html?xtmc=play_nice_ati_physx_patch&xtcr=1

However the techniques is not officially supported.

You might also be able to switch between the two by using HDMI and DVI inputs both connected to the same monitor and using the monitor's on screen menu to switch what drives the monitor.....but this is all conjecture as I have never tried it.

Back in the day, I'd just write different autoexec.bat files and load different setups via a boot menu but those days of simple boot menus are gone.....wouldn't know how to attempt that now.