dual video cards, ATI & Nvidia in same PC for different games

[PingSpike]

I've got an x1900xt. And while I like it a lot, I also have a widescreen monitor with no scaling options and I enjoy playing older games on occasion. ATI drivers have no maintain aspect ratio option and older games often have no ability to use non-4:3 aspect ratios.

I'd like to game with black bars using the scaling while using maintain aspect ratio option that nvidia cards have.

I was thinking that since only older games lack widescreen support I could just buy a 6200 or something and install it for use with my older games and it would have plenty of horsepower to get the job done.

Is this going to turn into a driver nightmare though? Is it easy to tell an application which 3d card to use?

 

[nitromullet]

From a driver/OS perspective this wouldn't be very difficult. You could just create two different hardware profiles, each one with the other card disabled. You would only need to install one video driver per profile. This would require a reboot to switch back and forth between profiles. You would probably also want an LCD with dual DVI inputs, or you'd have to manually switch the cables or run one card off of VGA.

The bigger problem would probably be that motherboards with dual PCIe X16 slots most likely assign these as primary and secondary. While I believe it is possible to run a single card from the secondary slot in most cases, it my not be possible to force the motherboard to ignore the primary card and only use the secondary one. I also think that chipsets work differently in this respect. For instance, on my Crossfire rig I know that both cards got power right at boot because I could see (and certainly hear) both fans spin up on my dual X1800XT's. However, on my AMD nForce4 SLI rig, the fan on the secondary card didn't spin up until after POST, which I assume is due to the fact that it was not getting power until POST was completed. If that's the case, it would probably be impossible to run with the second card only. In any event, you would most likely have to go into the BIOS every time you wanted to switch between the cards, I don't think you could swap on the fly with application profiles.

edit: I personally think it would be an awesome idea, and I have thought so since I the time I had a 9700 Pro and an FX 5900 in my possession at the same time... I was really wanting a dual AGP slot mobo, which I obviously never got. The feasibility and practicality of it is certainly up for debate though.

 

[PingSpike]

Thanks for the thoughts nitromullet. It doesn't seem like this is a very common setup so I have some concerns. Getting older games from the 9x era to run on 2K/XP is often a bit of a chore and introducing another element of complexity will just increase that.

But considering how cheap the 6200 is it might be worth the cost to try the experiment.

 

[nitromullet]

I would definitely be interested to hear the results of your experiment should you decide to do it. If it works I can be both a launch day buyer of an 8800GTX and the sensible person that waited for R600