Nvidia and ATi drivers at the same time?

cavemanoc · 2 Jan 2009 at 11:56

But of an odd one this. I have finally finished building my HTPC:

Asus M3A78-EM AMD 780G
(ATi 3200 - onboard GFX/sound)
nVidia 8800GTX
AMD 7750
4Gb Corsair

The rig is being used for TV/Movies and gaming until I can get a dedicated games machine built. I'd like to use the HDMI out (onboard ATi 3200) as it would give me audio as well as video and save an extra cable.

I was lead to believe that under Vista (32bit - I know about the RAM issue) you can no longer run ATi and nVidia drivers at the same time. Is this still true - is there a work around?

Ideally I'd like to have the whole rig sorted via shortcut keys like I did when I was using my old ATi x1900:
<Alt>+T (TV mode) Cloned display on the Plasma+TFT (720p)
<Alt>+G (Gaming) Single display on 22" TFT (1680x1050)
<Alt>+H (Hi-Def) Single display on Plasma (1080p)

This was perfect as the Plasma is downstairs in the lounge and the TFT is upstairs in the study so I could chop and change easily and without fuss.

Is there any way to achieve this with the Plasma being run directly via the onboard HDMI (+sound) and the 22"tft coming from the 8800Gtx?

And finally.... really random one - with hybrid crossfire can you run the output from either card? Ie: if I got a 4780, could I connect via the onboard HDMI and still get the full power from both cards?

(Edited for clarity

)

MarcLister · 2 Jan 2009 at 12:11

Don't understand where the need for Nvidia drivers come from? Are we talking ATI and Nvidia graphics here? :confused:

cavemanoc · 2 Jan 2009 at 14:57

Yep. The rig has an ATi 3200 on the mobo with an HDMI output that I want to use for the plasma screen and an nVidia 8800GTX which I use for games and want outputing on the 22" TFT. Hence I need both ATi and nVidia drivers - used to work fine in XP, but I was told it's a no-no in Vista?

MarcLister · 2 Jan 2009 at 15:36

Ah right. I thought you meant you had two graphics cards.

Surely the onboard would run off the mobo drivers?

uv · 2 Jan 2009 at 15:45

cavemanoc said:
Is this still true - is there a work around?

there is no work around, I'm afraid. It's due to the display driver model that MS switched to in Vista - although apparently this issue has been sorted in Windows 7, you'll be able to use more than one graphics driver.

Until then, your only workable option would be to downgrade to XP unfortunately.

NightSt@lk3r · 2 Jan 2009 at 15:48

MarcLister said:
Surely the onboard would run off the mobo drivers?

No, they use the Catalyst Drivers, the same as Nvidia Integrated GPU's use the Forceware drivers.

MarcLister · 2 Jan 2009 at 16:14

NightSt@lk3r said:
No, they use the Catalyst Drivers, the same as Nvidia Integrated GPU's use the Forceware drivers.

Ta. You learn something new every day eh!

cavemanoc · 3 Jan 2009 at 09:30

Final thought on this one - I know under XP you used to be able to specify hardware profiles for different users. Is this possible under Vista? So I could log in as "TV" and have the ATi 3200 installed and the TV connected via HDMI. Then if I wanted to game I could log in as 'Gamer' and have the nVidia 8800 installed?

Would it support fast switching with hardware changes or would it require a reboot?