Mixing GPUs

[doublesurface]

Hey guys,

Has anyone had any experience mixing Teslas or Quadros with Geforce cards? My current rig includes a Tesla K20 and a Quadro 5000 and I want to add two more cards ASAP. I'm looking at two Titan Blacks right now, and I know Octane can read a mix of different cards (as i am currently doing) but for some reason I remember reading somewhere that Teslas don't mix well with Titans(not sure what the said problem was). I'm no expert at all so I figured I'd check to see if that statement has any truth to it before I spend the money.

Thanks in advance!!!

[volumetricsteve]

AFAIK, this can be done. Mixing quadros and teslas is what Nvidia calls a "Maximus" configuration. Right now, I have a system with a Quadro FX 1500 (which isn't even a CUDA-capable gpu) paired with two Tesla M1060s. The only trick is to find a driver that will support all of your cards. I had to go through some hoops to get the right driver (linux 64, fx 1500, tesla AND Xorg .15 support) but it's possible.

Furthermore, I'm not sure octane really "cares" about what kind of gpu is being used, the sense I've been given is that octane only looks for cuda cores, so it's not looking for opengl rendering targets or anything else. To my understanding, Octane works very much like scientific-computing applications do in the sense it's only doing cuda-level work and not much else.

I wouldn't be surprised if you could go buy MSI, ASUS, and Zotac branded nvidia chips and get them to work perfectly all at once with Octane.


EDIT:

I just realized you're going to be working with Titans as well....I'm actually not sure where these fall, but I imagine they would work just fine, but keep the receipt just in case :p

[smicha]

It will work but Octane uses single precision and that is why GTX cards give best performance for money, e.g. 780.

[itsallgoode9]

it works fine and is pretty painless to setup. I have a Quadro k4000 running 3 monitors and 2x GTX 780 6gb for rendering on Octane. I just plugged in the two 780s, installed the correct drivers and everything starting working immediately.

[doublesurface]

Thanks a lot for the replies guys, I just ordered the cards, hopefully I'll be able to post about a successful combination in a few days

[doublesurface]

Just writing to confirm in case somebody else runs into that question, the combination of 2 Evga Geforce Titan Blacks, 1 Nvidia Tesla k20c and 1 Nvidia Quadro K5000 gave me no trouble. All are running just fine !!! just needed to get a good sturdy motherboard and a bigger case.