gtx-480/radeon for os combo?

[colin]

i upgraded to a gtx-480.
i now was wondering what to do with my old radeon x1950. atm i left it in. it is often recommended on this board to leaf a card for the operating system in order for it to run smooth. is that sort of thing possible with my set-up? - or would it have to be a ndvidia card too? would my motherboard have to be capable of sli? does my radeon do any good atm at all - or am i better off taking it out altogether?

thanx in advance guys!
colin

edit: this is on my machine at home - where i'm on a pc - hence the confusion with my signature...

[kubo]

SLI is not only not needed but should be turned off for multi-gpu usage in octane.
As of mixing an ATI (non cuda) and an NVIDIA, I think Radiance has said before that in some computers has worked and in others has not, search the forums.
Cheers

[colin]

thanx kubo,

i did actually search the forums - but no luck so far.
if anyone could give me a hint on where i would go about setting up said radeon as the os's card, i'd appreciate it. (i guess a radeon wouldn't appear in octanes cuda-devices dialogue box, even if i'd be one of the ones where mixed cards DO work? and that's the only way i know of, to manage multiple installed video-cards).

colin

[pixelrush]

Its been a while since I looked at this but I am pretty sure you cant get ATI cards to work together with Nvidia. Some have claimed it but only by hacks.
Octane is only being developed using Cuda ATM so you will need to go with Nvidia.
In the future perhaps there will be a port to OpenCL but I think it will still be either be ATI or Nvidia not a combination.
I dont see this port happening any time soon as there is quite enough for Refractive to do with developing the renderer and providing Windows, Linux and Mac builds and looking out for new drivers and emerging Nvidia hardware without the extra complication of ATI permutations as well.
I think you should take the ATI out. Replace it with a recent low cost , low power use Nvidia card for display purposes like a GT240/512mb. This can use the same the driver as the 480.
Perhaps you can sell the 1950 and put the money toward the 240 or buy your wife? flowers to cover up the 'needless expenditure'.
HTH

[grimm]

I have a similar setup on my work computer (I'm doing OpenCL programming). I have a ATI HD 5870, a GTX 480, and a 9400 GT all in one box. Some caveats though, It's a new box and I just got it up and running yesterday. I have not had a chance to test a cuda app on it like Octane (thats going to be one of the first things I do on monday) . I have tested the samples and my own OpenCL programs and I can see all of the cards on the system and run on them. This is on a Linux OS as well (Fedora 13).

How I did it was an adventure though. I put the ATI card in the first PCI slot and made it my display device. I installed the development ATI driver (both because it supports OpenCL 1.1 and it is more stable then the regular release) and set up X to run on it. I then installed the nvidia development driver (again for the same reasons). This did cause problems with X and the ATI driver (I think the nvidia installer overwrote some files), so I re-installed the ATI drivers. Then I found a script on the web that loads the nvidia driver into the kernel and then builds the necessary devices in the /dev directory. I can give you the script if you want to try it, it's just a bash script. Now I can use the ATI card for the display and run OpenCL programs on it, also the nvidia cards are working headless and appear to be fine as well. My code runs about 21 times faster on the 480 then on the 9400 I haven't had a chance yet to compile and run it on the 5870. There were problems though, it appears that the ATI driver doesn't fully support the new linux kernel that Fedora 13 uses, but it works. YMMV Hope this helps.

Grimm

[colin]

thanx pixelrush - might just do that...

at some point i was hoping it might have been possible to manage those cards within the os. for instance - i came along an application the other day that lets one concentrate system resources on just one app. that's when i had the thought that, if the second card was reserved for the os to run smooth, that should be manageable OUTSIDE octane as well.

then again - not worth the hassle, considering the price of a gt-240...

[pixelrush]

grimm, Yeah with Linux I think there is a little more flexibility with workarounds but I think for Windows its not an option.
I was assuming he had Windows.

[colin]

hey - thanx grimm.

but indeed i am on a windows machine here. so i guess that's a no-go?

colin

[mib2berlin]

Afraid so, the next adventure is: get it to work with an intel onboard chip, ati and nvidia.
But this is for advanced users like grimm.
@colin, think about a dual boot system with linux, you work with a "linux" all day.

Cheers mib

[radiance]

the only things i can say:

- put radeon in PCI-E slot 1
- connect monitor to radeon's output

- put geforce in PCI-E slot 2

download the latest drivers for both cards from the relevant sites. (don't install them yet)

download driversweeper (google for it)
remove all drivers from nvidia and ati.
(don't reboot)

install the drivers you downloaded above.
for both the radeon and geforce.

reboot

try.
if ti works, eg octane uses the geforce and you see the image with say on of our demoscenes on the monitor.
you're very lucky.
if not, retire the radeon and use the GTX as your sole card.]
maybe if you see a bargain one day on a cheap GTZ250 or so around, grab it and use that for primary display instead of the radeon.

Radiance