Nvdia and ATI Cards On the Same Workstation?

scooterlibby

Senior member
Feb 28, 2009
752
0
0
Forgive my ignorance on this matter - I am not an IT hardware expert. I have been building gaming setups for myself for years and was aware a few ways you could use more than one GPU. I have personally tried SLI and Crossfire. There is also the mix and match Lucid Hydra and 'switch between' Optimus type of thing that I know of.

Anyways they were setting up my workstation at my job and I knew the general specs of the Dell T3500 workstation they were giving me. What surprised me was to see our hardware guy plug in an ATI FirePro in one PCI-E slot and an Nvidia 450 in another and then run two separate lines out to each of my monitors.

How does this work? If the cards aren't working in tandem through a bridge (forgetting the fact that they are both ATI and Nvidia), how do they divide the activity? How does each card handle the load in general and what do they do when I expand an application to fill both monitors? Just curious.
 

cmdrdredd

Lifer
Dec 12, 2001
27,052
357
126
Later versions of windows can run both drivers at the same time. I did it with Windows 7 with a hacked driver to run Physx on an Nvidia card while an AMD card is installed too.
 

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
7,721
40
91
generally works ok, I have AMD card on 3rd display. Windows take care of it. Each card is assigned two displays. I haven't tried games, but HW accelerated 2D stuff works fine as long as it is on one card.
 

Smartazz

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2005
6,128
0
76
I too used to run an nvidia and AMD card in the same system. Took out the physx/DC card because it was generating too much heat.