2 Gpus

[DoggoWaffles]

can i have a gtx 1060 and a amd radeon 560 in at the same time because i have an extra gpu just laying around and no one wants to buy it

[SansVarnic]

2 minutes ago, DoggoWaffles said:

can i have a gtx 1060 and a amd radeon 560 in at the same time because i have an extra gpu just laying around and no one wants to buy it

You can have them in the same machine at the same time but they wont work together to improve graphics quality.

You could use the second gpu to fold with ....

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, DoggoWaffles said:

can i have a gtx 1060 and a amd radeon 560 in at the same time because i have an extra gpu just laying around and no one wants to buy it

Technically yes. But it's not gonna do much part from consume power.

[Donut Dan]

If you're doing Folding@home like me, it's great to have a second GPU. for other uses, though, it will often do nothing.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Its a shame as DirectX 12 was supposed to allow you to do exactly that, use any combination of GPUs.  I guess it was just too complicated to write game engines to handle it.

[GDRRiley]

Just now, Alex Atkin UK said:

Its a shame as DirectX 12 was supposed to allow you to do exactly that, use any combination of GPUs.  I guess it was just too complicated to write game engines to handle it.

some game engines do it but it often doesn't make sense unless you got 2 very similar cards.

[Snowarch]

i have a spare gpu as well. was going to 1060-sli hack them(have p106 and am on linux) but driver wont see it also people post bench marks but no how tos. only thing that sees it is "hwinfo --short". i could fold if driverless folding is a thing. and i knew how.

[Snowarch]

but to answer your question kinda depends. diffrent sli auto for same series brand cards (1030-1080 ish) and amd's crassfire.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, DoggoWaffles said:

can i have a gtx 1060 and a amd radeon 560 in at the same time because i have an extra gpu just laying around and no one wants to buy it

Basic answer: Yes, but you probably will get no benefit from doing so. Especially when they're the low-end cards, and doing so degrades the main PCIe connection from 16x to 8x.

 

The main benefit you get from having two GPU's of any type (including the Intel iGPU on CPU's with them) is that it gives you a second/third OpenCL pipeline that certain software that is multi-gpu aware can take advantage of (eg v-ray), however unless you're doing video transcoding, you will probably not get any benefit from the second GPU since it would then require four passes through the system bus to compress. The initial render, then from the GPU to the system memory, once again to the second GPU to be compressed then back over the system bus to be packetized to the network. If you have any software composition, then that adds yet another layer and pass through the system memory.

 

As far as general purpose use goes, the primary benefit to two GPU's is to add additional monitors to a system that has has already exhausted the maximum displayport topology via Multi-Stream Transport. In general, this should be seen as 2 monitors per physical DP port, though it's really defined by the maximum resolution, refresh rate and color space. So you can in theory have three 4K monitors on a DP 2.0 MST. Where as HDMI does not support this at all.

 

My suggestion, as per usual, is to use the faster card only, and unless you have a pressing need to compress two videos at the same time on the same machine, you probably won't ever find a use case for having both.