First post, by porschemad911
Just wanted to share my experience with running both AMD and Nvidia cards on my 32-bit Windows XP system. I know the conventional wisdom is that they do not play nicely together, and if switching between them should run DDU to totally wipe the other vendor's drivers from the system. I suspected this may be a myth, so did some testing.
First - the motivation? My WinXP system is working very nicely, using a Sapphire Radeon 7970. Well, working nicely except for the grass rendering bug in Star Wars KOTOR, one of my favourite games. I could not fix this using the gloverride patch with any of the driver versions supported by my 7970. So it looks like i needed to run an Nvidia GPU for that game. I didn't however want to use an Nvidia GPU for all my games due to the lack of GPU scaling support over DisplayPort.
My board (a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7) has 2 x PCIE 2.0 x16 slots, and my 850W Seasonic PSU has 4 x 8-pin PCIE cables, so I grabbed an old GTX 670 and installed it in the second x16 slot. No issues with booting into Windows and installing the Nvidia drivers. No issues after rebooting - the 7970 provided POST display output, desktop display output in WinXP and ran games perfectly fine, just like before installing the Nvidia card and drivers. Device manager showed both cards, the Nvidia and Catalyst control panels identified the cards fine and all seemed to be working well.
To switch between the GPUs, I found the following to work well:
- Reboot into BIOS and toggle which PCIE slot to init display from
- Shutdown and switch DisplayPort cable over to the desired card
- Boot - POST, Windows display output and games all seem to use the desired card just fine
Primarily I'm running things on the 7970, but it is nice to be able to switch to the Nvidia GTX 670 GPU for a game that is problematic with Radeon drivers.
