nVidia and ATi Cards Together

[dave-lew99]

Hi All,

The Background: I run four monitors on my desktop, this requires two graphics cards, when i was last running windows i used an AGP Radeon 9200 and a PCI Radeon 9200, this worked perfectly without problems.
I moved to Linux and because i wanted proper dual screen support i changed the AGP card for an nVidia 6600GT which works more or less OK with the PCI Radeon card to give me 3 screens.

I attempted to use this configuration under windows and the nVidia drivers just obliterated anything else that i plugged in (Radeon or old Voodoo card).

The Aim: Is there any way to get them to play nicely with each other (maybe using the Omega drivers?)

This used to work, it's something nVidia changed...erm...post Geforce4 era... but it definitely used to work. I don't need powerful cards, just lots of outputs and therefore im loathed to spend a lot of money on something like a quad head card when there's no sensible reason for it.

I can't test it out as i don't want to go to the effort of installing windows again to find it can't be made to work - just wondering if anyone has/is doing this already.

Failing that i'm going to have to buy a PCI nVidia card i suppose...

 

[dave-lew99]

Thanks guys, the problem i was having was that the nvidia control panel was knocking out anything else i tried to use - both the ATi and Voodoo cards.

Not sure if that forum/guide will help as i don't even have PCIe on this machine, nevermind a card with SLI support!

I may give it a go later on, if i get around to swapping the HD out of my mediacentre that it. (need this disk as it's my 30gig test OS disk)

Is it easily possible to do 'driver only' installs for nvidia cards? Last time i checked you were forced into installing their control panel app.

 

[dave-lew99]

If i can extract the actual driver from the setup executable then maybe it can be installed in device manager otherwise probably not.

I'm avoiding vista, i'm happy with XP - it works. I'll be able to give it another shot soon.

 

[dave-lew99]

So far it's a no go, once the factory nvidia drivers are installed, the Ati installer refuses to accept i have an ati card and just exits, same for trying to use device manager to point to the driver.

 

[dave-lew99]

I give up, it cannot be done, i've tried multiple different revisions of the drivers, the omega drivers and still no go.

nVidia absolutely refuse to coexist with any other GPU type.

ATi works fine with none ati cards but nVidia won't.

 

[dave-lew99]

Well thats annoying....obviously it can be done!

Just perhaps not with my two cards - you are able to enable a screen output on both cards though?

 

[dave-lew99]

Windows 7 next year is touted to be able to offer multiple display outputs from different GPU manufacturers.

Hehe, my main machine won't even run vista....

But at least they're working on it, even decent multi monitor on linux is slowly coming along (but only if you use nVidia cards it seems) but that's still a long way off for me - one of the reasons i've gone back to windows.