Mixing Two different Display adapters needed

Kirks 3D Printing · March 21, 2020

I have a requirement for two different GPUs but am not sure how to implement it. I have a Quadro K5200 video card for my CAD mechanical design work which laughs at gaming cards (I think the error message was "are you kidding me"). And I have a the Oculus Rift S VR headset that says "I can't use your 4 year old CAD Video card. Stereographic VR is DEAD(no longer supported)". So I bought a 2060 super to make the Oculus Rift happy. But I would still like to use the Quadro card for CAD work. If I install both, do I use Quadro as main slot 0 and RTX 2060 SUPER on slot 1 . Then plug VR headset into the RTX 2060 and the monitor into the Quadro Card? will that work? Can I tell the driver to use the 2060 for other games ? or do I reboot with 2060 connected to the monitor.

Dash Lambda · March 21, 2020

It depends on the software.

I would put your 2060 in the main slot because it's the more powerful one and it'll be used for real-time stuff. Games will generally default to GPU0 (main slot) or whichever card is outputting to the primary monitor, whereas CAD programs should let you choose what resources to allocate to it.

For a while I was running a primary 980ti and a secondary 780, using the 980ti for gaming and the 780 for background compute and occasionally PhysX. I could have the 780 training a neural network in the background without impacting the performance of the rest of the system, but most of what I did on the 780 was either F@H or Tensorflow, both of which allow you to explicitly control what hardware they use.

(This is past tense because my 780 blew up, I plan to get a new card and have a similar arrangement soon but commerce really isn't doing well right now.)

If you do end up using a heterogeneous configuration, the true beauty of it is that you could be rendering a scene in CAD while playing a VR game at the same time and not notice a difference, provided your CPU and RAM are up to it.

LIGISTX · March 21, 2020

9 minutes ago, Kirks 3D Printing said:

I have a requirement for two different GPUs but am not sure how to implement it. I have a Quadro K5200 video card for my CAD mechanical design work which laughs at gaming cards (I think the error message was "are you kidding me"). And I have a the Oculus Rift S VR headset that says "I can't use your 4 year old CAD Video card. Stereographic VR is DEAD(no longer supported)". So I bought a 2060 super to make the Oculus Rift happy. But I would still like to use the Quadro card for CAD work. If I install both, do I use Quadro as main slot 0 and RTX 2060 SUPER on slot 1 . Then plug VR headset into the RTX 2060 and the monitor into the Quadro Card? will that work? Can I tell the driver to use the 2060 for other games ? or do I reboot with 2060 connected to the monitor.

I could be wrong, so hopefully someone else chimes in as well if I am, but I think you plug VR headset AND monitor into the 2060, with it normally in the top PCI slot, and that way it'll work for games and such. In your CAD software, it should see that you have a Quadro, and it will offload the simulation to that card and pipe the video output through your 2060. I think....

Can always try that and see if CAD sees the Quadro. But also, are you sure a card that old actually out performs a 2060 even in CAD work? I know the drivers for Quadro are heavily optimized for CAD work (its really just software trickery), but a 2060 may brute force its way through it, no? I could be totally off, I don't work with CAD often anymore...