Mixing AMD and Nvidia

[tmcthree]

Hi,

So here's a noob question for you...

Is it possible to have two graphics cards, of different makes, running on my machine and have one handle the viewport etc and have the other "in the background" just to provide cuda cores for GPU rendering?

My situation is that I have two cards. An AMD Firepro v7900 and a GTX Titan. I had the Firepro first but switched to the Titan in order to use GPU rendering in Vray. Problem is, the Titan isn't very good in the Maya interface. (It draws well, but selecting objects and other operations are really slow when using very high poly counts. (It may be the case that the Firepro is just as slow, I never reinstalled it to do a proper comparison, but the impression I get is that the Firepro is better for Maya viewport.)

So is it possible for me to have the best of both worlds? As I understand it, Vray just looks for cuda cores on the system to use...

Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance...

Intel 3770k
Maya 2014
Windows 8.1

[savage309]

Is it possible to have two graphics cards, of different makes, running on my machine and have one handle the viewport etc and have the other "in the background" just to provide cuda cores for GPU rendering?

As far as V-Ray is concerned, there is no problem with that.

However, I have seen quite a few machines on which the NVIDIA GPU can't run any CUDA program because it does not have the monitor attached to it (or the system can't see the NVIDIA GPU at all). If this happens to you, you can try using nvidia-smi tool to turn of the display driver of the NVIDIA GPU and use it for compute only (TCC), here is how.
Not all NVIDIA GPUs support the TCC compute mode. I know for sure that Titan X supports it, since I have AMD Fury X for display and Titan X in TCC for rendering.

p.s. there are no noob questions, just noob answers

[tmcthree]

hmm, cheers savage309, sounds promising.

[tmcthree]

Did it. It was really easy. I happen to use two/three monitors anyway so tat wasn't a problem.

So I display and use Maya on monitor 1 which is the firepro monitor. The viewport is a lot more responsive so it seems to be using the firepro card which is great. Interestingly even if I now move Maya to the "titan" monitor, it's still just as responsive. So I'm guessing that some of the Maya operations are still being carried out on the Firepro no matter which monitor the program is on. (Which I guess makes sense.)

Another thing which might be slightly more interesting to you. Out of curiosity, I wanted to try rendering with OpenCL. (I doubt I'd do this normally. The titan has about twice the cores than the Firepro has streams.) but I got the message..

Building OpenCL trace program for the Nvidia Cuda_GeForce GTX TITAN...

Which surprised me because I expected it to look for the AMD GPU if it was trying to use OpenCL.

Anyway, no matter. Main job done. Thanks for the help...

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Nvidia GPUs also supports OpenCL rendering, that's why V-Ray builds the trace program for it.
What is the status of each GPU in Select OpenCL Device tool?

[savage309]

Nvidia GPUs also supports OpenCL rendering, that's why V-Ray builds the trace program for it.
What is the status of each GPU in Select OpenCL Device tool?

It does, but having NVIDIA GPUs you will be better using only CUDA .