NVIDIA's Double Graphics Whopper: SLI Comes to Market

ATI X800 And GeForce 6800 Simultaneously

And lastly, one final test we just couldn't say no to. Even back in the days of Voodoo2, users had a choice of whether they would rather play 3D games via graphics card or a separate Voodoo2 card. So why not deploy a Radeon X800 XT PE alongside a GeForce 6800 Ultra (besides the price of course) and connect the cards to a monitor with two display inputs? Here's how you do it:

Installing the ATI Catalyst v4.11 driver alongside NVIDIA's v66.93 is no problem. After restart, the ATI driver returns an error message because the second display has not yet been activated. When this is corrected in the Windows Display menu the ATI driver options can also be accessed.

ATI and NVIDIA united together in harmony - at least inside the computer.

Now both ATi and NVIDIA icons are found in the taskbar.

On the first card, the GeForce 6800, the games run without problem. After switching over the primary display to the ATi X800 however we get a D3D error message when starting up a game. Restarting is no help either.

Changing out the cards, putting the X800 in the upper slot, does not work out well at all. After re-recognizing the graphics cards and rebooting, the driver for the GeForce 6800 does not load correctly even though the card is still shown as being installed in the Device Manager.

But we are not ones to give up so easily! So back to configuring the GeForce 6800 Ultra in slot 1 and X800 XT in slot 2. Again we designated the X800 as a primary monitor. In addition we switched the GeForce 6800 display off by deactivating "Extend my Windows Desktop onto this Monitor". Restart and voilà: all 3D games now run on the X800! It works!

Here is how we proceeded step by step. First only the GeForce 6800 Ultra is activated. Both NVIDIA and the ATI driver are installed as described above.

3D Mark 2003 starts on the GeForce 6800 Ultra.