Nvidia and AMD in same system

[mathijs727]

Hi everyone,

 

Lately I've been working on an OpenCL path tracer for a university project.

Now I want to start working on a new one as a hobby project.

 

Since OpenCL is a mess in so many ways, I've decided to go CUDA.

The problem is that I have an RX480 and I dont want to replace it.

So I'm planning on buying a power efficient (550W PSU) second hand Nvidia card (950/960/1050/1050ti) as a secondary GPU.

This should also have the advantage of supporting dynamic parallelism debugging, which I plan on using.

 

I read that Nvidia blocks Physx when an AMD card is installed and having both drivers installed introduces a lot of problems.

 

Will this work flawlessly (RX480 for display/gaming + Nvidia card for CUDA), or will the Nvidia drivers make a mess of my system with an AMD card installed at the same time?

[Atmos]

Personally, having been someone who ran a primary amd gpu with dedicated nvidia physx card in the past, I can say pretty easily that it just causes a lot of issues :L

 

It can be done, but running both drivers at the same time can lead to some pretty awful stability when trying to render or solve complex calculations. To get that "flawless" use out of having both cards, you'd need to restart your system between trying to use the 480 and w/e other nvidia card you're using for the different work you're trying to do, and for gaming.

 

If you want an idea of what it entails, LTT did a video quite some time back on a similar setup use-case.

 

 

[greeatzy]

This video will help you to understand things. When you want ot use AMD card you will need to disable the nvidia card and vice versa.

[TheRandomness]

You can have the output coming out of either card and drivers installed for both. I ran my R9 290 and GTX 750Ti together in one system for quite a while, with pretty much no issues. 

[i_build_nanosuits]

26 minutes ago, mathijs727 said:

The problem is that I have an RX480 and I dont want to replace it.

So I'm planning on buying a power efficient (550W PSU) second hand Nvidia card (950/960/1050/1050ti) as a secondary GPU.

 

why instead of blowing money on a PSU, an old nvidia GPU...why don't you just sell the RX 480 and buy a 1060 or a 1070 with the money?!

the RX 480 is not an old card it should be an easy sell and should still have good re-sale value...

[mathijs727]

1 hour ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

why instead of blowing money on a PSU, an old nvidia GPU...why don't you just sell the RX 480 and buy a 1060 or a 1070 with the money?!

the RX 480 is not an old card it should be an easy sell and should still have good re-sale value...

I never said I was gonna buy a PSU (550W is what I currently have and Im not gonna sell it).

And I dont wanna buy a GTX 1060 as a replacement because of its pricing (at least in my country) and performance.

Selling my RX480 (lets say 225eu) and then buying a GTX1060 (350eu) costs me 125eu and looses me freesync and possibly dynamic parallelism debugging in CUDA.

If I buy a second hand card, use it as a secondary, and possibly sell it when I sell my RX480 (not it the foreseeable future).

It will be worth more than a GTX1060 alone.

 

A GTX1070 is 500eu, thats almost twice the price of my RX480 NEW!

Even if I would take the risk of buying a GTX1070 second hand it will cost me close to 200eu.

Since this is for a hobby project, Im not willing to spend that amount of money.

[mathijs727]

1 hour ago, Atmos said:

Personally, having been someone who ran a primary amd gpu with dedicated nvidia physx card in the past, I can say pretty easily that it just causes a lot of issues :L

 

It can be done, but running both drivers at the same time can lead to some pretty awful stability when trying to render or solve complex calculations. To get that "flawless" use out of having both cards, you'd need to restart your system between trying to use the 480 and w/e other nvidia card you're using for the different work you're trying to do, and for gaming.

 

If you want an idea of what it entails, LTT did a video quite some time back on a similar setup use-case.

 

 

Thanks for the reply.

I had already seen that video but I think its pretty different to my use case.

 

I would not connect a monitor to the Nvidia card and use it for CUDA only.

So I could game and just use my computer normally with my RX480 and use the Nvidia card as a CUDA accelerator (like a Tesla card).

[mathijs727]

1 hour ago, Name Taken said:

The 4790k supports VT-d so you can use the iGPU for your host then pass the AMD and Nvidia GPUs into their own VM.

 

I dont want 2 seperate environments and running everything in VMs would impact performance.

[Lord Nicoll]

3 hours ago, mathijs727 said:

Hi everyone,

 

Lately I've been working on an OpenCL path tracer for a university project.

Now I want to start working on a new one as a hobby project.

 

Since OpenCL is a mess in so many ways, I've decided to go CUDA.

The problem is that I have an RX480 and I dont want to replace it.

So I'm planning on buying a power efficient (550W PSU) second hand Nvidia card (950/960/1050/1050ti) as a secondary GPU.

This should also have the advantage of supporting dynamic parallelism debugging, which I plan on using.

 

I read that Nvidia blocks Physx when an AMD card is installed and having both drivers installed introduces a lot of problems.

 

Will this work flawlessly (RX480 for display/gaming + Nvidia card for CUDA), or will the Nvidia drivers make a mess of my system with an AMD card installed at the same time?

I have an R9 380X and GTX 680 in my system right now for openCL and CUDA, it works fine (I even have my Intel iGPU working too). there aren't any problems, but it eats more RAM than I'd like, over 1GB in drivers and such. 

[mathijs727]

42 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

I have an R9 380X and GTX 680 in my system right now for openCL and CUDA, it works fine (I even have my Intel iGPU working too). there aren't any problems, but it eats more RAM than I'd like, over 1GB in drivers and such. 

Thanks for your insights.

 

Im happy to hear that it works well.

I can live with high RAM usage so I'm gonna go through with the dual GPU setup

[Lord Nicoll]

9 minutes ago, mathijs727 said:

Thanks for your insights.

 

Im happy to hear that it works well.

I can live with high RAM usage so I'm gonna go through with the dual GPU setup

Although, I have audio issues, it was from the CPU being pegged at 100% all the time, I run the system 24/7 but find it works best with reboots about every 12 hours.

[mathijs727]

1 hour ago, Lord Nicoll said:

Although, I have audio issues, it was from the CPU being pegged at 100% all the time, I run the system 24/7 but find it works best with reboots about every 12 hours.

Ill just try, in the worst case scenario I resell the card with a small loss.

[Lord Nicoll]

7 minutes ago, mathijs727 said:

Ill just try, in the worst case scenario I resell the card with a small loss.

The biggest issue by far that I was heat though, my GTX 680 is under my Nitro R9 380X, and causes it to pull in hotter air, the other issues are really tiny and only come up because this machine runs BOINC almost all the time.

[Drak3]

I currently run an RX470 and GTX 1080 in the same system. The only significant issue I have is updating AMD's drivers. I need to perform a clean uninstall and then install the new drivers. Other than that, just minor hiccups with the RX470 (after the initial introduction of a 1070).

[mathijs727]

Just for future reference:

 

I got a good deal on a GTX1050 and went with it.

At first boot I didnt get any output because I put the Nvidia card at the top.

Rebooting and changing the bios setting (enable "windows 8/8.1 features") with the Nvidia card connected (temporarily) fixed the issue.

 

After installing the drivers, CUDA toolkit and Nvidia Nsights I am now able to run and debug CUDA code.

The CUDA toolkit complains about no compatable graphics device being installed, ignore this and use custom install to disable driver installation.

I had the same problem on my laptop (also GTX1050) so it seems like an issue with the CUDA toolkit (it comes with an old driver that does not support Pascall, so just install the latest game ready drivers manually).