Hey everyone, long time no see. I want to run with 4 monitors. I have 3 1080p monitors that I want to be able to game with panoramic-ally and then use the 4th one to monitor stats (temps, fan speeds etc). But my main video card only has 3 outputs. I'm running a GTX 1060 6gig and so I put in an old 8600gt for the 4th monitor. Here's the problem. When I put the 8600gt in windows (8.1, 64bit) detected it as a "generic video card", which would have been fine, but I got no output from that card. So I highlighted it in control panel and updated the drivers for it. That allowed it to work but it shut off the 3 monitors on my main card and borked the display settings for that card. I tried several things to fix this: reinstall the drivers, removed the 8600gt in control panel settings then search for new hardware, but either the 4th monitor doesn't display or it displays but I get 0 or 1 monitor to display off of the 1060. I can't get all four to detect and display at the same time. Any advice?
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two different video cards in one system
- Thread starter eobard
- Start date
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2003
Have you checked in the Nvidia control panel? I don't know the answer to your question but I know that when I right click on my desktop and select the Nvidia settings, I can poke around in there to setup SLI and Surround and Physix and what not. There it shows which card is connected to which monitor. While I know that there are only two generations apart, I can't even remember when I had an 860GT. That was a while ago. If you don't see anything in the Nvidia control panel, you may have to follow ED's advise and upgrade to a bigger card with four outputs.
eobard, you won't be able to do this. All display output has to go to the same card. I don't believe there is any intuitive (native) software stack to direct displaying of an image across multiple gpus.
Think of it this way with your current setup. If you were to stretch an image across all the monitors, Windows would need to understand that a portion of the rendered picture needs to be sent to the 1060, while another portion to the 8600GT. The driver/firmware environment of the Windows (and I believe Linux) software stack can't interpret this message. It will understand that there is a monitor connected, but not understand to project an image into it because the Windows environment can't encode the picture to produced on both GPUs at the same time.
Now maybe if you have two of the exact same cards not in SLI/xFire this may work. And you may need Windows 10 or a more modern Linux OS to handle the multi-gpu stack calling.
From my own experience, I have been able to mix GPUs into a system. I've had a Vega 64 and a GTX960 in my system working perfectly fine. The Vega 64 of course my main GPU, while the GTX960 was used as an offload GPU for CUDA calls. I too tried to attach another monitor to see if it would drive the display. I got the same result as you did.
Think of it this way with your current setup. If you were to stretch an image across all the monitors, Windows would need to understand that a portion of the rendered picture needs to be sent to the 1060, while another portion to the 8600GT. The driver/firmware environment of the Windows (and I believe Linux) software stack can't interpret this message. It will understand that there is a monitor connected, but not understand to project an image into it because the Windows environment can't encode the picture to produced on both GPUs at the same time.
Now maybe if you have two of the exact same cards not in SLI/xFire this may work. And you may need Windows 10 or a more modern Linux OS to handle the multi-gpu stack calling.
From my own experience, I have been able to mix GPUs into a system. I've had a Vega 64 and a GTX960 in my system working perfectly fine. The Vega 64 of course my main GPU, while the GTX960 was used as an offload GPU for CUDA calls. I too tried to attach another monitor to see if it would drive the display. I got the same result as you did.
It could be? I think there is something different about discrete and onboard vs two discrete GPUs. I'd have to do some investigating. I relate those desktop designs to the laptop designs where you see the discrete GPU acting as the source for displaying, while the discrete acts like a dedicated GPU to specific tasks.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2008
I've seen many situations where it works to have a display attached to onboard and another to an add on video card. The ability to do that may depend on the motherboard. But that's only two monitors. Four? That might be a challenge under any circumstance.
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