two video cards from different brands on one PC

[esa1203]

Just a simple question.

Is it possible to run two video cards from different brands on one PC?
Main card is a NVidia GeForce 8800 GTX and the secondairy card will be a ATI Radeon 9200 PRO in the PCI slot.
I am worried that it might make my PC unstable with two video drivers running

Jeroen Bos

[Matt Olieman]

It's been a while, but I've done it. I'm talking 7 to 8 years ago, when windows first started to support multiple graphic cards.

[737NUT]

I just tried it and had some issues. I was using an ATI primary and Nvidia as secondary. I don't recommend it myself.

[BHawthorne]

Mixing ATI and nVidia is gonna give you bad driver conflicts. However, if you used same-brand you should be ok.

[sas550]

I don't think it cause a driver conflict. The conflict is with the two softwares to control the advanced settings. ATI=CCC and Nvidia=Control Panel. I've done this without any problems with one AGP and one PCI. I didn't install the Catalyst Control Center only the ati drivers.

[esa1203]

I don't think it cause a driver conflict. The conflict is with the two softwares to control the advanced settings. ATI=CCC and Nvidia=Control Panel. I've done this without any problems with one AGP and one PCI. I didn't install the Catalyst Control Center only the ati drivers.

thanks everybody for the help. I remember now reading somewhere that it was indeed a conflict between the control centres and are going to try this suggestion. There's always a system restore

Jeroen

[visualchaosfx]

Wait a minute. So it really is possible to run 2 video cards on one PC??? Well what I currently have is a Nvidia 7600 GT PCIe video card. Its got the dual DVI setup. Now I have an ATI card with a DVI output and VGA output. Now all I need to do to make this work is to just install the drivers for the ati card and not that stupid contro center?

Now say I get this to work. Is it going to matter if I have the same size monitors or different sized monitors? Currently I have a 17" LCD and a 15" LCD plugged into the 7600 GT and everything works great. I mainly use this configuration for 2D cockpit mode flying as I have undocked the MIP and placed it on the 15" LCD monitor and have the visuals and overhead panel on the 17" LCD. It would be really cool to get this to work. Then I wouldn't have to get the triplehead2go thingy.

[esa1203]

Wait a minute. So it really is possible to run 2 video cards on one PC??? Well what I currently have is a Nvidia 7600 GT PCIe video card. Its got the dual DVI setup. Now I have an ATI card with a DVI output and VGA output. Now all I need to do to make this work is to just install the drivers for the ati card and not that stupid contro center?

I didn't have time yet to test this, but according to what is said above it should work.

Now say I get this to work. Is it going to matter if I have the same size monitors or different sized monitors? Currently I have a 17" LCD and a 15" LCD plugged into the 7600 GT and everything works great. I mainly use this configuration for 2D cockpit mode flying as I have undocked the MIP and placed it on the 15" LCD monitor and have the visuals and overhead panel on the 17" LCD. It would be really cool to get this to work. Then I wouldn't have to get the triplehead2go thingy.

The size of monitors doesn't matter, Any brand/size will do, but don't think about running your visuals over 3 monitors this way. The graphical power comming from your secondairy card is not enough to do this. It will slow your fps down. Really you should need the triplehead to go for this. But if you want to split your instruments over one or more monitors than this can be a solution.
I am going to display my FMC and overhead on the extra monitor. I want a touchscreen flatscreen monitor for that, which are pretty cheap at EBay, and can use my FMC with my fingers. The overhead is just there so I can use it with switches on the hardware version (in the future) through Key2mouse.

[Padraig]

I used to have 2 8800 GTX OC2 in SLi thinking that they would run FSX or 2004 with double the frame rate. Well this isn't true and I tried all types of tweaks etc with the drivers with nhancer etc still notthing, infact it actaully caused the framerate to go down a bit. So I sold the card and bought a intel quad core and that really helped with framerate to a point where I can now have everything up full esp traffic etc and get frames of 35 - 75 region with just one good card and a good processor, I used to have the 2.4ghz Core Duo before the Quad.

[visualchaosfx]

I didn't have time yet to test this, but according to what is said above it should work.



The size of monitors doesn't matter, Any brand/size will do, but don't think about running your visuals over 3 monitors this way. The graphical power comming from your secondairy card is not enough to do this. It will slow your fps down. Really you should need the triplehead to go for this. But if you want to split your instruments over one or more monitors than this can be a solution.
I am going to display my FMC and overhead on the extra monitor. I want a touchscreen flatscreen monitor for that, which are pretty cheap at EBay, and can use my FMC with my fingers. The overhead is just there so I can use it with switches on the hardware version (in the future) through Key2mouse.

Well I tried this out and it works. I installed the 2nd card and windows automatically installed the drivers for me. Both monitors are running at 1024 x 768. I'm using the PMDG 747. Aerosofts Heathrow 2008 Scenery with almost all FS9 settings set to their maximum level. My current framerate has dropped from 29.7 (when I was just using the 7600GT) to 16.1 in 2D cockpit mode with the MIP undocked onto the 2nd monitor. So I guess I'll just stick with Nvidia setup that I have now and get some money saved up so I can get the triplehead interface. But other than that, the idea works.

I can see why people elect to use multiple PCs in conjunction with Wideview because you could essentially have a higher end PC to display the visuals and have all of the scenery addons on that computer and then the other PCs would just have to display the panels thus eliminating the workload on the high end PC. I may go with this route as well as I'm finding Dell Pentium 4s on eBay for cheap.