Legit Reviews

I've seen mention of folks using a 4000 series ATI card in conjunction with a 9000 series nvidia card set as a Physx card and actually being able to use Physx features in games and see tangible effects in benchmarks. Has anyone here had any success personally or know of someone who has had success with such a setup?

I'm not running ATi and nVidia but I am running two cards; one for physx and one for graphics. I don't see why you couldn't put in a CUDA enabled GPU and run it like that. Your motherboard should allow you to dictate which PCIe slot you boot video from.

Getting the drivers to play nice will be the fun part.

If you are seriously looking into it, your best bet is to find where someone has done it and see if they have had any problems with conflicting drivers, and what (if anything) they did to get round it.

Dan

I remember reading bout a physx card working with a very recent ATI card..but the issue with that is you would need to get a hold of the actual original physx card(before nvidia bought Ageia) and use those old drivers too..got good results. I forget what website I saw it on..but its not a bad idea if you got the slot for it(might be easier for ATI using people, not sure)..im sure 2 gpus(ATI+Nvidia) can do it, but like DMB said..drivers will more than likely be a PITA more than anything

I have an ATI 4850 running as primary (thanks LR!) and I tried running a 9600 GSO as a secondary card. Now I didn't try to run it as a Physx card, but I never could get it the NVIDIA card to run right. My only goal for running the GSO was to fold with. I never could get it (folding) working and ended up throwing the card into a new rig. But I don't think there were any driver issues.

Since I didn't try to use the Physx I don't have any info, but I could get display to work on two monitors.

Just came across this...

NVIDIA Slips-In PhysX 9.09.0121 System Software
NVIDIA made its latest version of the PhysX system software available today, version 9.09.0121. The update aims to fix several issues with the older 9.09.0010, relating to its installation, runtime environment, game-specific and graphics accelerator-specific. To begin with, this version of the software resolves issues noted during installation on some non-English versions of Windows. It resolves issues relating to the PhysX SDK runtime with multi-GPU configurations. It fixes an issue with the game Mirror's Edge where occasional crashes were seen. Performance increments are in store for users of GeForce GTX 285 and GeForce GTX 295 accelerators.

http://www.techpowerup.com/83606/NVIDIA ... tware.html

It doesn't specify what multi-gpu configurations means specifically (SLi, nVidia+nVidia, or nVidia+ATi?).

Well the most likely is they are fixing it to run better with other nvidia cards. No incentive for them to help their competition now is there.

Dan

Sporg wrote:I have an ATI 4850 running as primary (thanks LR!) and I tried running a 9600 GSO as a secondary card. Now I didn't try to run it as a Physx card, but I never could get it the NVIDIA card to run right. My only goal for running the GSO was to fold with. I never could get it (folding) working and ended up throwing the card into a new rig. But I don't think there were any driver issues.

Since I didn't try to use the Physx I don't have any info, but I could get display to work on two monitors.

You can do that on Windows XP, but you can't from what I've been told on Vista since it won't let you install two different video card drivers.

What if...

You install the 9x00 card and let Windows install the driver via Windows Update. Then just install the Physx software and open the control panel and point to the 9x00 video card?

Apoptosis wrote:

Sporg wrote:I have an ATI 4850 running as primary (thanks LR!) and I tried running a 9600 GSO as a secondary card. Now I didn't try to run it as a Physx card, but I never could get it the NVIDIA card to run right. My only goal for running the GSO was to fold with. I never could get it (folding) working and ended up throwing the card into a new rig. But I don't think there were any driver issues.

Since I didn't try to use the Physx I don't have any info, but I could get display to work on two monitors.

You can do that on Windows XP, but you can't from what I've been told on Vista since it won't let you install two different video card drivers.

I use XP. Just couldn't get folding to work, so built a comp for the wife with two of those GSO's that had the awesome rebate.

DMB2000uk wrote:Well the most likely is they are fixing it to run better with other nvidia cards. No incentive for them to help their competition now is there.

Dan

I've actually heard that nvidia doesn't care if ATI runs Physx. Interestingly awhile back I came across a site that claimed to have been able to hack CUDA up a bit to allow Physx to run natively on an ATI card w/o an accelerator. They may not like each other in terms of discrete graphics goes but helping AMD to allow their physics calls to run on their hardware does make sense somewhat since it will allow them to solidify their position within the physics arena of the market against Intel/Havok. I doubt they will go out of their way to help their competitor but its not like the CUDA SDK is closed source or anything like that.

I do worry about the high risk for driver conflict which is the main reason I haven't splurged on a card yet.

Apoptosis wrote:

Sporg wrote:I have an ATI 4850 running as primary (thanks LR!) and I tried running a 9600 GSO as a secondary card. Now I didn't try to run it as a Physx card, but I never could get it the NVIDIA card to run right. My only goal for running the GSO was to fold with. I never could get it (folding) working and ended up throwing the card into a new rig. But I don't think there were any driver issues.

Since I didn't try to use the Physx I don't have any info, but I could get display to work on two monitors.

You can do that on Windows XP, but you can't from what I've been told on Vista since it won't let you install two different video card drivers.

Not that I'm using Vista (64bit xp atm) but this is whats a bit confusing. I know that the way the OS was built it won't allow 2 different sets of vid drivers to be installed but enabling the physx features seems to use an installer from the nvidia website that looks nothing like a traditional graphics driver installer.

(http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx_9.09.0121_whql.html)

The thing I am unsure of is weather or not this driver allows the card to be used as an actual display.

Your system still has to recognize and install the software for the hardware. The PhysX software is more of an app for the hardware that is already installed.

Major_A wrote:Your system still has to recognize and install the software for the hardware. The PhysX software is more of an app for the hardware that is already installed.

Ah I understand. I wonder if Windows 7 has the same limitations as Vista when it comes to video card drivers.