Mixing an ATI card with an Nvidia card for Physics

frank007

frank007

New member
Can anyone give me any advice on this. It sound interesting. I would maybe like to try it. Not to the extreme of the earlier thread with 5970 and GTX480 but maybe a 5870 and a GTX250 or something. Would it improve gaming performance and if yes in what way? I would maybe like to try it with my 4890. Which Nvidia card would be good for physics?
 
Well, all the Nvidia card would do is PhysX, so only games with PhysX support would see any benefit. Probably a good idea to go for an NVidia card in the 200 series as the cost:benefit ratio gets pretty silly when doing this with the 400 series cards.

There are pretty much 2 advantages to this setup:
1. You get to use PhysX while having an ATI card as your primary rendering card.
2. You get a card dedicated to rendering and another dedicated PhysX, this takes a LOT of load off the rendering card which can easily get bogged down trying to do both.

Disadvantages:
1. The setup isn't supported, NVidia is in fact against the setup completely and recently explicity disabled the ability to use this setup in their drivers.
2. You have to use some community developed hacks that modify your installed NVidia driver so it doesn't disable itself when detecting an ATI GPU.
3. Support for those hacks are best effort and made and maintained by people in their spare time, with NVidia actively working against them, so you take an expensive gamble on how long the setup will continue to work.
 
The only way this is even remotely a good idea is if you have a lot of cash to blow, because sooner or later Nvidia and ATI will make sure that its impossible to have both these cards running in the same rig. Like black hand said, there is only a handful of people that are devoting time to making hacks for bypassing nvidia's blocking.
 
Yes but i really cant understand why they would not support it! really stupid on their part! If they were to support it then they would be making more sales as more people would be using this type of setup. The ATI fans normally stay ATI fans and the same goes for nvidia fan boys. this is stupid! Money i have, not to blow though! I would still like to try! An interesting experiment!
 
As an experiment, your better off going with a very very cheap NVidia card that supports PhysX, better if you just had an old one lying around.
 
I dont have one hey! That sucks! I need to get one soon. I might go out just now to get a GTX250 to test. They are cheap now. There are some for R1500 now some places even cheaper but dont feel like waiting. haha.
 
I currently have a HD4890 and a spare XFX8800GT and was thinking of trying this.. But then all the "Nvidia against it stuff" and the mission didn't seem really worth it.

If it could somehow magically increase all game FPS by like... 20-30FPS, I would go for it, but otherwise meh :P
 
From what little i know, it wont really improve your fps by that much. It will take stress off your 4890 and it will give you physx in games that support it! Give it a try it wont damage your hardware. The most that would happen is that you would probably have to reinstall ATI drivers. wont take that long!
 
frank007 said:
From what little i know, it wont really improve your fps by that much. It will take stress off your 4890 and it will give you physx in games that support it! Give it a try it wont damage your hardware. The most that would happen is that you would probably have to reinstall ATI drivers. wont take that long!
Click to expand...

if that fails just give it to me and I will do it :D...

EDIT: Oh I only has one PCI-E slot :(
 
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Its not worth it. About 50% of the market doesn't have PhysX capable cards, so all games must be designed to work without/around it. So most of the code paths work just fine without it.

Unless of course you have cash to burn...then its a different matter.

Blackhand said:
2. You get a card dedicated to rendering and another dedicated PhysX, this takes a LOT of load off the rendering card which can easily get bogged down trying to do both.
Click to expand...
Not quite. It will take some load off the CPU, not the rendering card as the CPU handles physics calcs if no PhysX capable card is available.

frank007 said:
Yes but i really cant understand why they would not support it!
Click to expand...
Its a business choice. Nvidia wants users to buy Nvidia cards, not hybrid setups.
 
If you check April or May(not sure which one) edition of PcFormat there are MSI mobos that are now coming out with a special chip that allows mixing of ati and nvidia cards.Rather pricey though and doesnt seem to work a 100%,but no hacks needed.

Cheers
 
Its the May issue and the mobo has got a Lucid Hydra chip that allows for mixing gpu's with less than impressive results!!Also 5 grand for that mobo!!!
 
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