using DX10 and DX9 cards at the same time

anon6

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Jan 21, 2007
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If you use both say an 8800-series and an older DX9 PCI-E videocard at the same time, for multi monitor purposes, would this cause foreseeable problems (driver, etc) in Windows XP/Vista?
 

aka1nas

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Aug 30, 2001
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You might not be able to do it in Vista as they don't use the same driver currently AFAIK. Vista does not allow heterogenous multi-display configs, at least not without some serious downsides.
 

anon6

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Jan 21, 2007
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I don't wish to install two versions of Forceware. The 8800 driver page states that it supports DX9 for GF6/7/8 cards. Can I use the 8800 driver alone for both the 8800 card and the older card?

Basically I have two requirements, high performance DX10 and quad-monitor support. Another way is to run two 8600 GTS/GTs in SLI, which might be slower.
 

aka1nas

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You won't be able to use the other 3 displays while SLI is enabled is the only downside to the latter setup.

I was under the impression that there is not a unified driver for Vista available yet that supports both G80 and the older cards.
 

BassBomb

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Nov 25, 2005
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Originally posted by: anon6
I don't wish to install two versions of Forceware. The 8800 driver page states that it supports DX9 for GF6/7/8 cards. Can I use the 8800 driver alone for both the 8800 card and the older card?

Basically I have two requirements, high performance DX10 and quad-monitor support. Another way is to run two 8600 GTS/GTs in SLI, which might be slower.

Oh my bad, from what I knew 8800 had their own set of drivers (different from the rest of the bunch)
 

anon6

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Jan 21, 2007
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Originally posted by: BassBomb
Oh my bad, from what I knew 8800 had their own set of drivers (different from the rest of the bunch)

Actually I think you're right for the 8800's XP driver which apparently supports that series only, but for the 8800's Vista driver it lists other cards as well.

This implies that mixing 8800 and older cards may work in Vista but not in XP. Hmph.
 

aka1nas

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No, In XP you can run multiple display drivers and do multiple monitors. It one of those things that SHOULD work fine, but may be a little quirky in practice.

Vista has the restrictions because the GPU has to do all the compositing now via the WDDM driver, and evidently having two such drivers running at the same time is probably a royal PITA to deal with. Vista can deal with such a setup, but it would have to run in legacy mode with what is essentially the XP graphics stack. This would make you lose desktop compositing as well as virtualized video memory. In other words, you lose most of the "Vista-ness"
 

anon6

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Jan 21, 2007
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Originally posted by: aka1nas
No, In XP you can run multiple display drivers and do multiple monitors. It one of those things that SHOULD work fine, but may be a little quirky in practice.

So in XP you can simply install two different Forceware drivers for two cards, and no special configurations are required?