Best of both big VGA worlds

While working on our Avivo Winter 2005 Update article, I had cause to ponder what it'd be like to run NVIDIA and ATI graphics boards, on PCI Express, side-by-side in the same system.

Would their display drivers play nice together? Would any of my applications have a fit? I sought to find out shortly after the work for the Avivo piece was done, and over the weekend I wrote up my findings.

In a short piece just for my .blogz readers, here's how I got on.

http://img.hexus.net/v2/graphics_car...roof-small.jpg

The reason for sticking it in .blogz is to get your personal feedback directly to me on how useful you think such a setup is. Would you run it? Do you think it's useful for anyone else? Is it just a daft exercise with no real merit? Whatever you think after reading the article, let me know in this thread; I'm keen to hear your feedback.

You is a crazy man Rys, but you are definately my kind of crazy man! :bowdown:

Nicely done, and you have my full jealousy. :thumbsup:

As you point out - the best interest is in directly comparing the output on the same monitor without having to change anything else.

The problem is as you say you are having to use the analogue input to provide additional input to the monitor. I don't really see this as being any different from using an external switcher that selects from two video sources for display to the screen - you're just using the monitor controls rather than a switch on the splitter thingy.

If you could use two DVI inputs there would be more merit in IQ comparisons - but even then I am not sure I would guarentee DVI 1 input being identical to DVI 2 - no more so than comparing two seperate identical monitors - again, better to use a splitter/switcher thing.

But if that was out of the way, then yes you could use it for IQ assesment. If you were silly you could play games on either card - just switching depending on which card runs your current game the best :p - or maybe you play on your gtx512 and just use the X1000 card instead of an Ageia PhysX card ;)

However, I'd still be wary of the mixed drivers - well done NVidia and ATI so far.. but I can see it getting messy - not least in terms of competition for resourses - maybe more so now that drivers are starting to take advantage of dual cores. Is it robust enough to cope with calls to DirectX from two different sources.. simultaniously?

But yes, otherwise - daft article :p Multimonitor set ups are surely better handled by either dual output from a single card, or at the most two cards from the same manufacturer. :p

I've found a couple of apps in the last day or so that will try and use refrast on the XL, when asked to do 3D, rather than the HAL, but apart from that it's still all good. Haven't tried 3D at the same time using both boards, but a quick think says that might be the thing that'll trip me up. I'll have a proper go later on and let you know.

Daft, yes, but cool!

Frankenputer!

"It's alive! It's aliiiiiiive!!"

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rys

Haven't tried 3D at the same time using both boards, but a quick think says that might be the thing that'll trip me up.

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See what kind of trouble thinking can get you into? Now stop that silliness and go try it! :lol:

Gave this a go today in the lab as didn't have much better to do and discovered that the NVIDIA drivers do not like it at all if the primary card is an ATI.

Swap the cards round so the NVIDIA is in the first PEG slot and it all plays nicely!

Nice idea. Glad to see things are good when it comes to competeing cards coexisting as well. Makes a change :)

can you only use the avivo hd decoder on the display connected to the xl?