ATI cards

[Nicinus]

This is a copy from the RT forum, I realized that I may have put my questions in the wrong place:

1) I have a Radeon 5870 and need a second card for GPU so I'm wondering if anyone here has experience from running a mixed combination of ATI and nVidia? I'm thinking of getting the GTX460 as it has nice performance ratio for the price (2GB/336 cores), and I really don't want to spend more money until cards with more memory comes available.

2) Another thing that confuses me, the bigger GTX480 has 480 cores whereas my existing Radeon has 1600 stream units? Is this comparable or do they use a different scale? If so, how many nVidia cores would an ATI core represent?

3) I would honestly rather stay with Radeon cards as they seem to provide better value, is there a reasonable guess as to when ATI's OpenCL drivers will be available and usable?

Thanks

[Nicinus]

Ok, so it seems as if I've found some bad news for those of us that was hoping to be running a mixture of ATI and nVidia, i.e. a ATI card for display and a GTX for GPU:

http://hothardware.com/News/New-NVID...U-Is-Detected/

So far my issue hasn't received much of a response, but I would really appreciate an comment on this. Vlado?

[Nicinus]

And hope comes back

http://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_...7_15_drivers/1

Since no one seems to use an ATI for display and a nvidia for gpu I guess I will have to order one and try.

[Nicinus]

I've now received a Palit GTX 460 2GB and for those that wants to use a Radeon for display and nVidia for GPU I can now confirm that it works, at least in my case. There is a lot of discussion about this on different forums, and apparently nVidias drivers at some point started to block some of their functionality if they sense the presence of a non-nvidia card. Now I don't know if they've changed their policy on this, or if it only applies to PhysX and not the CUDA as such, but I'm using the latest drivers 260.99 under Windows 7 64-bit together with a Radeon 5870 and it was an extremely problem free installation.

[jstrob]

Can you also use Physx?
Do you have 2 monitors, one on each cards? I'm thinking about buying an Ati v7800 for display (which seems very fast for display in max and around 600$) and a GTX 580 for physx and vray RT

[Nicinus]

I don't know about PhysX, I haven't tested it, but most of the sources I googled seemed adamant that the nVidia drivers would disable PhysX if a non-nVidia card was present. Why this doesn't apply to CUDA I don't know, but it definately works.

I have three monitors, all connected to the ATI 5870 (one DVI, one displayport and one HDMI). I don't even have a dummy plug on the GTX 460.

[scottsch]

I am running an ATI FirePro V4800 for my display and a GTX 260 in a spare PCIe slot for GPU boost. GPU is almost twice as fast as CPU in this configuration.