Any confirmed ATI GPU with NV physx on Win 7?

S

schoenda

Gawd
Joined
Apr 8, 2003
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So I got a chance at a cheap 260 to use for physx but I am not ready to change out the 4870 X2 yet...as I have Vista this has not been an option for me....

Has anyone confirmed personally that you can run ATI video with NV physx under Windows 7? I know it is supposed to work but rumors abound and I would love to hear from someone with firsthand experience.
 
Not with the latest drivers no.

No first hand experience sorry but nvidia have cut off the ability for it to work in tandem with an ati gpu in xp or win7.
 
necrophile said:
Not with the latest drivers no.

No first hand experience sorry but nvidia have cut off the ability for it to work in tandem with an ati gpu in xp or win7.
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Well, if true, NV has just lost a sale. F them.

Thanks for the info SS! For me it is not worth "hacking" the drivers...and they will probably close this loophole even tighter in the future...what is NV thinking?
 
schoenda said:
Well, if true, NV has just lost a sale. F them.

Thanks for the info SS! For me it is not worth "hacking" the drivers...and they will probably close this loophole even tighter in the future...what is NV thinking?
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Exactly my thoughts. I had hoped with the release of Win 7 I could have bought a nice 8800 or something to use as PhysX but with this, not a chance in hell. :mad:
 
Just got my gts250 today to go along side my 4850.

Working in Win7 RC x64 with 186.16 Nvidia drivers with the 185.68 nvapi.dll and nvapi64.dll files along with the latest PhysX software.

The only thing I have had trouble with is one of Nvidia's Demos that runs in OGL.... When I try to run it, it says it requires an 8 series or higher Nvidia card.... This is because my ATI card is set as primary.

I will be working on getting the newer drivers to work.... may take a while, but I have a pretty good idea of what has to be done to get the newer drivers to work.
 
After a tiny bit of testing.. it looks like the nvcuda.dll files are what is probably blocking Cuda and therefore PhysX from working in the newer driver revisions.
 
Way to stick it to the man Cyclone! Seriously, keep us posted...but honestly if nvidia wants to badly enough they will just keep borking the workarounds with every new release...I am putting my plans to get a 260 as a ppu on hold indefinately.
 
schoenda said:
Way to stick it to the man Cyclone! Seriously, keep us posted...but honestly if nvidia wants to badly enough they will just keep borking the workarounds with every new release...I am putting my plans to get a 260 as a ppu on hold indefinately.
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Did some more version testing.. and it looks like they added more blocks to other files after 186.18..... but.. that can be remedied I am pretty sure.. just may take a bit of creative programming.

The good thing is.. I very much doubt that the newer D3D and OGL dlls have any "blocking" in them... but I will have to check and see.
 
I will try to do some more testing tonight.... maybe hobble together a set of drivers containing the newest files possible that will currently all work together.
 
Nvidia basically broke the drivers on purpose... either that ot they really need to get a new driver team.

When my ATI card driver is enabled, the Nvidia control panel seems to have no idea what card I have installed. Under Help --< System Information --> Driver, it basically gives you no information about the card except the driver version.. everything else is blank or unknown.

Soooooo..... if we would use an older control panel with the newer drivers, PhysX might work just fine with the newer drivers.
 
cyclone3d said:
Nvidia basically broke the drivers on purpose... either that ot they really need to get a new driver team.

When my ATI card driver is enabled, the Nvidia control panel seems to have no idea what card I have installed. Under Help --< System Information --> Driver, it basically gives you no information about the card except the driver version.. everything else is blank or unknown.

Soooooo..... if we would use an older control panel with the newer drivers, PhysX might work just fine with the newer drivers.
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They ARE breaking it on purpose:
http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/16223-nvidia-disables-physx-when-ati-card-is-present.html
 
Hypernova said:
They ARE breaking it on purpose:
http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/16223-nvidia-disables-physx-when-ati-card-is-present.html
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Yeah.. been there. I would think if they were smart though, they would still be able to block it without actually breaking things in their own control panel.

Maybe their card detection routine just ins't capable of detecting an Nvidia card properly unless there is another card installed that isn't Nvidia. Maybe the intentionally did that... or maybe they didn't and then saw what the effect of the bug was and decided to leave it like that.
 
cyclone3d said:
Yeah.. been there. I would think if they were smart though, they would still be able to block it without actually breaking things in their own control panel.

Maybe their card detection routine just ins't capable of detecting an Nvidia card properly unless there is another card installed that isn't Nvidia. Maybe the intentionally did that... or maybe they didn't and then saw what the effect of the bug was and decided to leave it like that.
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Well this B3D thread has ppl speculating that the real reason is NV using driver level hacks to get things to work efficiently (or intend to soon).
 
Soooo.. decided to try different driver versions all the way back to the 182 series....

Guess what.. in the 182 series, the Nvidia Control Panel was just causing an error when I tried to launch it.

This got me to thinking that the Nvidia Control Panel is ALWAYS looking at the first PCI-e slot first and if it couldn't identify what was in it, it siimply wouldn't even look at the second slot.

So.. I decided to put my ATI card in the second slot and the Nvidia card in the first slot.

Rebooted and let it install the drivers and then rebooted again.

Guess what.. The Nvidia control panel now identifies the Nvidia card properly.

"Strange" how the ATI drivers don't have this issue.

Seems to me like a bug that Nvidia decided to leave in and use "to their advantage".

Going to do some more testing now.... we shall see how things work out now that the Nvidia control panel is working "properly".
 
cyclone3d said:
Soooo.. decided to try different driver versions all the way back to the 182 series....

Guess what.. in the 182 series, the Nvidia Control Panel was just causing an error when I tried to launch it.

This got me to thinking that the Nvidia Control Panel is ALWAYS looking at the first PCI-e slot first and if it couldn't identify what was in it, it siimply wouldn't even look at the second slot.

So.. I decided to put my ATI card in the second slot and the Nvidia card in the first slot.

Rebooted and let it install the drivers and then rebooted again.

Guess what.. The Nvidia control panel now identifies the Nvidia card properly.

"Strange" how the ATI drivers don't have this issue.

Seems to me like a bug that Nvidia decided to leave in and use "to their advantage".

Going to do some more testing now.... we shall see how things work out now that the Nvidia control panel is working "properly".
Click to expand...

"Strange" indeed....
I've always purchased Nvidia cards and never one from ATI but this type $h!t Nvidia is pulling is pushing my money right to ATI.
 
cyclone3d said:
Soooo.. decided to try different driver versions all the way back to the 182 series....

Guess what.. in the 182 series, the Nvidia Control Panel was just causing an error when I tried to launch it.

This got me to thinking that the Nvidia Control Panel is ALWAYS looking at the first PCI-e slot first and if it couldn't identify what was in it, it siimply wouldn't even look at the second slot.

So.. I decided to put my ATI card in the second slot and the Nvidia card in the first slot.

Rebooted and let it install the drivers and then rebooted again.

Guess what.. The Nvidia control panel now identifies the Nvidia card properly.

"Strange" how the ATI drivers don't have this issue.

Seems to me like a bug that Nvidia decided to leave in and use "to their advantage".

Going to do some more testing now.... we shall see how things work out now that the Nvidia control panel is working "properly".
Click to expand...

keep us updated man!
 
yes, please keep up posted on this. it is certainly interesting that slot config and file swaps seem to be allowing the use of an nvidia card for physx with ati for graphics. of course, if this is true, I'll just leave my gtx 275 in the first slot and buy 3 mid-range radeon hd 5xxx cards for the other 3 slots.
 
Hrmmm.... well. It looks like the newest that still work are the 186.18 with the 185.68 nvapi.dll files.

I tried the 190.38 set and it didn't show up PhysX.. so I tried putting the 185.68 nvapi.dll files there.. and it showed up PhysX but it didn't really enable it even though it said it was enabled.

So I tried adding the 186.18 cuda.dll files and it still didn't work...

After that I tried the 186.18 driver set with the 185.68 nvapi.dll files and the 190.38 cuda.dll files.... PhysX showed up but didn't work even though it was set to enabled.

So.. bah.. back to square one.


The problem is still the Nvidia drivers detecting the ATI driver because if I disable the ATI driver in Device Manager everything Nvidia suddenly starts working like it should in the first place....

Hrrrmmmm hrrmmm hrmmm....
 
cyclone3d said:
Hrmmm.... well. It looks like the newest that still work are the 186.18 with the 185.68 nvapi.dll files.

I tried the 190.38 set and it didn't show up PhysX.. so I tried putting the 185.68 nvapi.dll files there.. and it showed up PhysX but it didn't really enable it even though it said it was enabled.

So I tried adding the 186.18 cuda.dll files and it still didn't work...

After that I tried the 186.18 driver set with the 185.68 nvapi.dll files and the 190.38 cuda.dll files.... PhysX showed up but didn't work even though it was set to enabled.

So.. bah.. back to square one.


The problem is still the Nvidia drivers detecting the ATI driver because if I disable the ATI driver in Device Manager everything Nvidia suddenly starts working like it should in the first place....

Hrrrmmmm hrrmmm hrmmm....
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When you are able to enable PhysX but it does not actually work have you tried using a dummy plug and extending the desktop to that card? i had to do this to get PhysX working on my setup, even though it says PhysX was enabled.
 
LAiN_OfTheWired said:
does it look for them in a specific spot? :)
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What do you mean by a "specific spot"?

I don't think it is looking at the registry because the registry entries would still be there if the driver was installed but disabled.

I don't think it looks for the files by name in the windows folder for the same reason.

I know it is not specifically looking to see if ntikmdag.sys is running.. because I renamed the file to nvidia.sys as well as changed the installer.inf to install nvidia.sys instead of atikmdag.sys...

It could be looking for a service named atikmdag...... be back in a bit with results.
 
Well... it is not possible to change the driver class (force it to install in a different area in device manager).

I tried it and the ATI driver gives some strange error while installing and CCC refuses to load with some other errors.

They all look like something to do with th way Windows handles hardware... like missing API calls and stuff.

Also tried installing with a few files renamed.... the atikmdag service renamed to nvidia.... etc.

I am wondering if the Nvidia drivers are just disabling PhysX if they can't recognize a video card that is installed in the system... or a video driver that is active that it doesn't recognize.

It may have nothing to do with it looking for specific things at all.... which would kinda make more sense as it would take up a decent amount of code and time to look for specific hardware id's, files, etc.

But if the Nvidia driver says... hrmmm, I don't recognize that active video driver. I will disable PhysX.. then that would take a small amount of code and almost no time whatsoever.
 
cyclone3d said:
Well... it is not possible to change the driver class (force it to install in a different area in device manager).

I tried it and the ATI driver gives some strange error while installing and CCC refuses to load with some other errors.

They all look like something to do with th way Windows handles hardware... like missing API calls and stuff.

Also tried installing with a few files renamed.... the atikmdag service renamed to nvidia.... etc.

I am wondering if the Nvidia drivers are just disabling PhysX if they can't recognize a video card that is installed in the system... or a video driver that is active that it doesn't recognize.

It may have nothing to do with it looking for specific things at all.... which would kinda make more sense as it would take up a decent amount of code and time to look for specific hardware id's, files, etc.

But if the Nvidia driver says... hrmmm, I don't recognize that active video driver. I will disable PhysX.. then that would take a small amount of code and almost no time whatsoever.
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did you do what i said, go back to when you had the new drivers working and were able to enable PhysX but PhysX was still not working.

try using a dummy plug and extend the desktop.

When i built my new rig about a month ago i could enable PhysX but it was not working in the games, i could not figure it out but then i put a dummy plug onto my dedicated PhysX card(8800GS) and extended the desktop and it started working, it has something to do with windows 7.

Go back to where you were here

tried the 190.38 set and it didn't show up PhysX.. so I tried putting the 185.68 nvapi.dll files there.. and it showed up PhysX but it didn't really enable it even though it said it was enabled.
Click to expand...
 
AMD_Gamer said:
did you do what i said, go back to when you had the new drivers working and were able to enable PhysX but PhysX was still not working.

try using a dummy plug and extend the desktop.

When i built my new rig about a month ago i could enable PhysX but it was not working in the games, i could not figure it out but then i put a dummy plug onto my dedicated PhysX card(8800GS) and extended the desktop and it started working, it has something to do with windows 7.

Go back to where you were here
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Don't need a dummy plug.. I have a second monitor physically hooked up to the Nvidia card.. and the desktop is extended to it.
 
Awesome work here, cyclone3d. I'd love to throw an 8800GT in for physics processing. Keep up the good work, everyone else too.

I wish I had the patience to mess around with that kind of stuff.
 
anyone test a dedicated ppu i would figure the cards that where released before nv's takeover would still work with out a problem with ati gpu's and what is the performence differences between a ppu and and nv card doing the physics
 
ive got my 4850x2 and 8800gts workin with the newest cat 9.9 and 191 beta drivers. I used the patch from ngohq and it works perfect. My 8800gts is extended to my tv via s-video so I just have desktop extended to it.
 
I'm really tempted to give the NGOHQ driver a go, but I don't feel like having to clear out the space and cables in my case if it's not 100%. If some more people can verify it works, I'll give it a shot.
Do you need to install the Nvidia graphics driver or just the latest PhysX runtime?
 
Domingo said:
I'm really tempted to give the NGOHQ driver a go, but I don't feel like having to clear out the space and cables in my case if it's not 100%. If some more people can verify it works, I'll give it a shot.
Do you need to install the Nvidia graphics driver or just the latest PhysX runtime?
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It really isn't a driver... it is a patch that you run after you install the driver although I did see on there that somebody had posted a pre-patched driver set.

I have it working fine with the 191.03 driver set.
 
I gave it a try and it DOES work.
I'm still pulling 60FPS in the Batman benchmark with PhysX enabled on my GTS250...so I suppose it's a success :)
 
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