Vista, OpenGl, multiple video cards - long [Resolved]
-
So, a $1 capacitor on my Supermicro AMD Opteron MB blew, thereby creating ~$3000 of useless hardware - not happy. At least i could keep the graphic cards: 7800GTX 256, 8800GTS 512. While i try to source a new capacitor (16V 270uF low ESR solid cap - anyone know a source ?), i had to get a new machine to keep working. I settled on a GA-X48-DQ6 (first non-supermicro board in > 10yrs) w/ 8GB and a Q9450 - not a tough choice. Tougher was what OS to install, i had been running XP x64. I decided to try Vista Ult x64. The OS installed without much issue, but SQL Srv 2005 was a pain, seriously, MS dropped the ball here. After a couple days all was reinstalled and reconfigured. There is enough new stuff that i'd like to keep Vista, but i absolutely HATE Win Explorer. A good bit of my dev uses OpenGl. When i went to run one of my small (OpenGl) apps the thing would peg 2 cores and sometimes crash - not good. Went to the nVidia OpenGl SDK samples, not one would work right - phew, not my code but wtf? The nVidia DirectX SDK samples all worked fine - conspiracy!. Installed various nVidia driver versions - no joy with any. One thing i noticed is that the nVidia samples showed they were using the 7800 card when they were running on the 8800 driven monitor. Googled a bit and found some interesting stuff about Vista and multi-card support. I took the 7800 out and everything works great. My working theory is that Vista is using the 'lowest' card for the entire desktop and, for some reason, this causes OpenGl to use software rendering (anyone with alternate ideas ?). Found another cheap 8800 GTS 512, going to try it later today to see if i can get 3 monitors back with hardware OpenGl support. [EDIT] Got the new 8800 GTS 512, put it in with the other and, with both in the system, all OpenGl apps work as expected. [/EDIT]
...cmk The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying. - John Carmack
modified on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 12:18 PM
-
So, a $1 capacitor on my Supermicro AMD Opteron MB blew, thereby creating ~$3000 of useless hardware - not happy. At least i could keep the graphic cards: 7800GTX 256, 8800GTS 512. While i try to source a new capacitor (16V 270uF low ESR solid cap - anyone know a source ?), i had to get a new machine to keep working. I settled on a GA-X48-DQ6 (first non-supermicro board in > 10yrs) w/ 8GB and a Q9450 - not a tough choice. Tougher was what OS to install, i had been running XP x64. I decided to try Vista Ult x64. The OS installed without much issue, but SQL Srv 2005 was a pain, seriously, MS dropped the ball here. After a couple days all was reinstalled and reconfigured. There is enough new stuff that i'd like to keep Vista, but i absolutely HATE Win Explorer. A good bit of my dev uses OpenGl. When i went to run one of my small (OpenGl) apps the thing would peg 2 cores and sometimes crash - not good. Went to the nVidia OpenGl SDK samples, not one would work right - phew, not my code but wtf? The nVidia DirectX SDK samples all worked fine - conspiracy!. Installed various nVidia driver versions - no joy with any. One thing i noticed is that the nVidia samples showed they were using the 7800 card when they were running on the 8800 driven monitor. Googled a bit and found some interesting stuff about Vista and multi-card support. I took the 7800 out and everything works great. My working theory is that Vista is using the 'lowest' card for the entire desktop and, for some reason, this causes OpenGl to use software rendering (anyone with alternate ideas ?). Found another cheap 8800 GTS 512, going to try it later today to see if i can get 3 monitors back with hardware OpenGl support. [EDIT] Got the new 8800 GTS 512, put it in with the other and, with both in the system, all OpenGl apps work as expected. [/EDIT]
...cmk The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying. - John Carmack
modified on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 12:18 PM
This is supposedly the facts[^]. Judging by that article, there is most likely something wrong with your driver. FYI, I had to switch to DirectX drivers for UT99 (the first Unreal Tournament game). The OpenGL driver crashes way too often.