Arch Linux

granada

Member

Registered: 2012-02-20

Posts: 19

Dual GPU, ATI + NVidia. Is it possible?

Hello. I work with CUDA in the college and now i am kidding around with pyrit. And i have seen that ATI cards outperform the nvidia ones, with a lower price. So, is possible to use an ATI card with a NVIDIA card? The main card(the one that will provide video) will probably be the nvidia or the onboard, since when computing with cuda the video keeps freezing.

My motherboard is a z77m-d3h and my gpu is a msi gtx 660 ti. The mobo has 2 PCI-E slots.

Will be any problem with drivers?

I also want to start using openCL with and ATI card. But i dont want to buy another computer or to physically change which card i will be using. So i need both ATI and NVidia cards on the same computer.

Thanks..

Lone_Wolf

Member

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,911

Re: Dual GPU, ATI + NVidia. Is it possible?

To clarify :

your cpu does have an integrated intel gpu ?
You also have a Nvidia card installed and are thinking of adding an AMD videocard to the system ?

That would mean you get a TRI GPU system, each needing a different driver .

IF you want to use the AMD card for OpenCL only, not for video output, it MAY be doable.
The main question that needs to be answered for that imo is :
Can you use OpenCl on a card without having to install/run it's video driver ?

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

granada

Member

Registered: 2012-02-20

Posts: 19

Re: Dual GPU, ATI + NVidia. Is it possible?

The cpu does have the intregrated gpu. The cpu in question is the i5 3570k.
Actually I dont need the intel gpu.
I do have the nvidia card with the drivers, sdk, cuda and so on.

I dont know if I can use opencl without the video driver. Can I?

carneiro

Member

Registered: 2013-08-13

Posts: 1

Re: Dual GPU, ATI + NVidia. Is it possible?

Hi I'm very interested in this topic. I have an AMD Radeon HD 7850 which I have been using for 2 years without issues. I have however started doing a lot of CUDA development so I needed an NVidia card to test my code at home. Folks at work gave me a Tesla which doesn't have a VGA out, it is really just meant for compute, not graphics. I have installed it but I'm having a hard time installing drivers as the pacman -S nvidia tries to replace mesa-libgl and the AMD drivers won't let it happen.

Does anyone know how to install an NVidia card as a compute only card and keep the AMD as the de-facto video card? Any help is much appreciated.

granada

Member

Registered: 2012-02-20

Posts: 19

Re: Dual GPU, ATI + NVidia. Is it possible?

Are you using PACMAN? If yes you can use it with the 'dd' parameter. Like pacman -Sdd package. This way it wont check the dependencies and conflicts.
If it dont work then you can edit the PKGBUILD file. Look for 'conflicts' and edit as you wish.

But beware, this may screw your system.

I got and old ati 5550. Later when I am home I shall try using both card. I will post here the results

Lone_Wolf

Member

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,911

Re: Dual GPU, ATI + NVidia. Is it possible?

carneiro :
try opencl-nvidia / opencl-nividia-304xx , looking at their dependencies it should be possible to run them without having the nvidia video driver installed.

granada :
check https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Opencl
amd opencl solution currently requires catalyst to be present.
The gallium compute solution for the open source radeon driver requires a custom build of mesa.
(if you want to try this one, check lordheavy's mesa-git repo.  some details about using opencl with that repo  :https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=170468 )

I very much doubt the combination of nvidia video driver and catalyst or xf86-video-ati will work though.

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

granada

Member

Registered: 2012-02-20

Posts: 19

Re: Dual GPU, ATI + NVidia. Is it possible?

I got an old 8400gs and an ari radeon 5550. The 8400 computes about half one of my cpu core haha
I am a little out of time, but tomorrow I shall try using the ati radeon 5550 and the nvida 660ti.

Thank you for the help.