Stardock’s newest tech will let you mix AMD and Nvidia video cards in a PC

Comments

• demadil Member UncommonPosts: 88

  March 2016

  Wasn't it stardock that had a DRM that would destroy cd drives years ago. Thinkin the game that had the DRM was space rangers.
  
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,355

  March 2016 edited March 2016

  The downside is that it won't work right outside of a handful of corner cases.  This isn't the first attempt at doing so.  Look up Lucid Virtu for a previous attempt.  Using an AMD and Nvidia GPU at the same time sometimes performed worse than pulling one of the GPUs out of the system entirely.
  
  Someone who is writing a game engine and can tinker with the fine details of their own game engine will be able to get substantial benefit out of having multiple GPUs for their particular game.  But it's never going to be anywhere near as good as having a single, more powerful GPU.  Furthermore, how it's done depends on the fine details of the game engine, so at best, it's going to be very hit and miss for people who go for such a heterogeneous hardware approach.
  
  Trying to make that work well with arbitrary games that have arbitrary game engines doing arbitrary things is not going to work well.  That's a much harder problem than trying to make CrossFire or SLI reliably work right, and AMD and Nvidia have struggled mightily with that for many years, in spite of being able to make arbitrary changes to drivers.  The ability to modify drivers and knowing that the two GPUs are identical are two enormous advantages that Stardock won't have.
• Ridelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

  March 2016

  I would ~love~ software that would let me mix & match GPUs to get at least some performance benefit out of it. If for no other reason that to put that Intel iGPU to work doing something...
  
  I had high hopes for Virtu, but yeah, it didn't really go anywhere or provide any benefit outside of video encoding. I do know that nothing will beat a single faster card, but you don't always have a single faster card, and a lot of gaming computers have these iGPUs just sitting there idle... They aren't much, but seems like it would be a good market to tap if it can present any sort of benefit at all.
• Hulluck Member UncommonPosts: 839

  March 2016

  Thought Ark survival did something like this? I could have sworn that they put up a sticky not to long ago saying to go on and throw in any random GPU laying around to see gains.  Huh... Thought this feature was part of DirectX 12?
  
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,355

  March 2016

  Hulluck said:

  Thought Ark survival did something like this? I could have sworn that they put up a sticky not to long ago saying to go on and throw in any random GPU laying around to see gains.  Huh... Thought this feature was part of DirectX 12?
  

  DirectX 12 gives games ways to take advantage of multiple GPUs, but it can't magically make all games scale to multiple GPUs for you.  It's kind of like how having AVX instructions gives CPUs ways to do some work faster, but it won't magically rewrite your scalar code to use AVX.
• Hulluck Member UncommonPosts: 839

  March 2016

  Gotcha