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ATI with nVIDIA PhysX in W7 x64 - 2nd card not detected

Uriel

Uriel

Uriel

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I have an HD4850 and am trying to get a 8600GTS working with it for PhysX. This is on a Jetway HA08 Combo 790GX board. I'll be using them with only one monitor.

The 8600GTS is only detected if instaled in the primary PCI-e slot or in the secondary slot with no card in the first.

If the 8600GT in the 2nd slot with the HD4850 in the primary slot it fails to be detected in Device Manager.

If I put the cards the other way round it works (x8, x8 multi GPU on this board). Both cards are detected in device manager and extended desktop is functional. Unfortunately, as I'll be running with one monitor, I want the HD4850 as my primary display for BIOS and the motherboard has no option to display BIOS through the 2nd video card.

I've not tried completely unistalling the HD4850 and its drivers (plus driversweeper etc) before installing both cards so that's on the 'to do' list. Not sure drivers will help if Windows can't detect the 2nd card. Any other suggestions?

Sorry for starting another thread on this but the title of the previous one was rather misleading.
 
PhysX doesn't work with an ATI main card because thats the way Nvidia drivers are setup. There is a work around that allows this to work, should be able to find it doing a search on the internet. :)
 
Drivers are irrelevent really. With the cards the other way round I can install any drivers I want. With HD4850 in PCI-e slot 1 and 8600GTS in slot 2 the nvidia card is simply not recognised, so I can't install any drivers for it.

The nvidia drivers block on ATI for physX has been given an enthusiast 'patch' so there are now widespread reports of it working fine without having to do anything particularly complicated.

Let's forget physx for now and just work on getting the 2nd card recognised at all. I've established it's not dead and the slot is OK - so that's a start.
 
Uriel said:
Let's forget physx for now and just work on getting the 2nd card recognised at all. I've established it's not dead and the slot is OK - so that's a start.
Click to expand...

This is still rather confusing.

What are you trying to do?

Do you want to use the Nvidia as a physx only board or as a secondary display board?

If you want the ATi as primary card and the Nvidia as secondary you have to install the physx workaround - whether you want to use it for physx or not.

You cannot have an ATI and Nvidia on the same motherboard without using the physx workaround - whichever way round in the slots you have them.
 
Before worrying about drivers and windows at all your gonna have to try and get a config where the 4850 is primary for showing BIOS and 8600GTS secondry...

Its a real stretch but I wonder if the 8600GTS is like the 9600GT and gets its clock generator from the PCI-e frequency and somehow that doesn't work unless its in the primary slot.
 
Rroff seems to have grasped the point. Before I can attempt to set up the 8600GTS working as a physx card I need to get it working as a secondary card - at all.

At the moment Windows 7 x64 just fails to detect the card full stop, if the ATI card is installed in the primary PCI-E slot.

I hadn't heard about that 9600GT issue Rroff. Could you point me in the direction of any further info?
 
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/Shady_9600_GT

I wonder if some brands have done the same thing with more recent 8600GTS as well - I have run into a problem with the 9600GT before where it would only work in the primary slot of the persons PC which seemed to be down to its referencing the PCIe bus for the clock gen.

Its also possible the board/4850 in primary combo just doesn't play nice and locks out the 2nd slot for some arbitary reason.
 
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NV have blocked the use of Physx in setups where an ATi card is recognised as the primary. They're charming like that.
 
I don't need to know how to get physx working.

It works with a simple 3rd party patch that disables nVIDIA's exclusivity checks.

The problem is getting the 8600GTS to work at all as the secondary card in the PCI-E slave / secondary /whatever you call it slot with the 4850 in the master slot. Otherwise I'm having to use the 8600GTS's display to access my BIOS, which is a pain.
 
I would say if your serious about PhysX sell up what you have and get a GTX260 cheap as possible, otherwise forget it unless a killer physx title comes along its not worth it just for batman heh.
 
I'm not serious about it. The 8600GTS was a freebie. Hardware physx is nice to have but by no means essential for me.
 
It probably won't make any difference but do you have a 2nd monitor to try and see if having something plugged into both cards makes a difference?
 
I know this is a long shot, but increase your pci-e bus speed to 101 in the bios. Ive come accross this before I corrected it doing this.
 
Got both cards plugged into my Dell 2407wfp rev A04: one on VGA (via adaptor) and the other on DVI-D. Have tried swapping them round and it doesn't make a difference. When the cards work (swapped) the both display modes work and I can switch between them as I please.
 
Decided to swap the cards round after all and put up with the minor inconvenience of having my BIOS screen on VGA.

Just been playing Batman and PhysX seems to be working nicely (having downloaded the patch to allow PhysX in conjunction with ATI cards.
 
An 8600GTS is only going to slow your main card down. I tried one for physx and i got worse results than i did with just the GTX280 i had.

You really need a minimum 8800GTS 320 to make any real difference.
 
It's not going to slow down my ati card when physx is enabled is it? Sure it's fast enough with hardware physx disabled but that's not the point.
Anyway Batman runs acceptably with physx on high. Not as fast as with physx off there is a notable framerate drop when things get smoky but I can play it. Not bad for a freebie.
 
k sorted it

For ME I have 9800gt and 5870 installed 196.21. I went to safe mode, used PhysX-mod-1.02. Went back in to windows turn on PhysX GPU "Enabled". in nvidia control panel and it works fine must say the fog effect and other things just add a bit of realism which allot of games lack imo.

worth it for what it cost
 
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