Windows 10 + nvidia + amd?

[mwroggenbuck]

Hello all,

What I am thinking about doing may not be possible. However, if anyone knows how to do it, it would be the people in this forum.

I currently have an Intel i9 with a z490 motherboard running windows 10 professional. The graphics card is a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. I have been folding with this quite well, Now comes my question.

I have an extra AMD Radeon RX 570 that I am not using. Is it possible to hook this up in the same computer so it can also fold? I don't want to use the card on a monitor--I just want to fold (and still use my Nvidia card for folding and my monitors).

Any advice or help you can give me would be appreciated. I did a little searching around on the web, but I could not find anything definitive. I think that Nvidia and AMD drivers trying to coexist will make this problematic.

I definitely have enough power, slots, and cooling in the system so that should not be an issue.

I look forward to replies.

[ajm]

I have done this kind of GPU mix for a few months, from April to September, on different OS, and with Win 10 (1909 and 2004) it was actually smooth. I only took a few more precautions than usual, but I had no real issues.

I would only recommend to finish jobs and uninstall FAH (incl. data) before adding the new card, then install the proper drivers from AMD, and only then reinstall FAH. And you should be fine.

EDIT: Actually, that is not entirely true, i did have troubles at the very beginning, but it was on an AMD system (TRX40). There, the AMD GPU (5700XT) acted very weird while folding so I switched it to an X299 system after only a few days. But once there, it was smooth with Win 10. Kind of a nightmare with Ubuntu, though. But you should be okay.

[mwroggenbuck]

Interesting. So you think that all I have to do is put the card in a slot, attach power, start up and then download additional drivers? Windows 10 won't get confused between AMD and Nvidia drivers? Did you actually have AMD and Nvidia at the same time, or just one type?

[ajm]

I had both cards together. A 1080ti and a 5700XT, on an X299 platform. And it was fine.
As I wrote as an EDIT above, I only had troubles on a TRX40 system with this mix.

[mwroggenbuck]

Thanks for the information. Sounds like I might have a project to try in the next few days. I will post as to how it goes.

If anyone else wants to chime in with advice, please feel free to do so.

[ajm]

One thing I've learned is that the whole GPU folding compatibility issues are in a constant flux. FAH researchers work on new fahcores and new functions, while AMD and NVidia develop new GPUs and tweak their drivers, and Windows, Apple and the distros constantly adapt their softwares too. What is gold today may very well be lead tomorrow, and vice versa.
But for all I know, Win 10 + Intel platform + 2 not too recent AMD/NVidia GPUs will work fine together. The only useful precaution is to entirely uninstall FAH before a hardware change and reinstall it afterward, because as of now, as far as I know, according to my experience, FAH does a better job at detecting hardware during installation than at adapting its inner workings to hardware changes.

[mwroggenbuck]

I put the AMD Radeon RX 570 into the system and it appears to be working just fine. I did not delete in FAH install. I just added another GPU slot and the client seemed to configure it OK.

I do think that I am only getting 8x pci on both cards, but I don't think that is an issue. I am pretty sure that I read somewhere that 16x was overkill even for heavy gaming (it will be interesting to see if I notice any differences using my 1660 ti now since it will have a reduced PCI lane count).

Edit ----

I took a look at my mother board manual. Both slots will run at 16x. My previous MB had 3 of these types of slots and would reduce the number of lanes based on the number of cards plugged in. My new mother board only has two of these slots, and both will run at 16x. The total number of PCI lanes is just distributed differently than before.
-----

A few months ago, I had been using the 570, but it was almost always erroring out at 100% complete (unknown enum error documented elsewhere in these forums). It will be interesting to see if the now 0.0.13 core makes a difference. I won't know for about 4 hours.

Thanks for the information. I will post more information as I get more results.

[mwroggenbuck]

Well, I have been folding for more than a day without an issue. It looks like things are working correctly. I still have not quite figured out how windows 10 decides which is the "primary" GPU, but that is a secondary question.

[bruce]

Windows assigns the desktop to the monitor that was used during the WIndows setup processing. FAHClient identifies the GPU in some other way but lists them in that order at the top of the log and assigns them to slots to fit your config.xml. Apparently the FAHClient starts with the iGPU if there is one that's listed in GPUs.txt.