New NVIDIA Card - Now ATI Card Won't Process W/U

ARGH, Vista - always tries to get things wrong, and succeeds, when it comes to a heterogeneous set of GPUs....

The way I would try is, first manually un-install both set of drivers, not letting Vista try to install them at the inevitable reboots. Now manually download the two sets of drivers. Next install the ATI driver, then the Nvidia one, rebooting as necessary, but preventing Vista installing drivers. With the drivers installed manually you should find both cards are functioning, and recognised by S@H/BOINC. You may need to do a bit of tuning on the S@H configuration files to get things working properly.

How long to wait for a download, that entirely depends on the servers at S@H, anything from "I blinked" to a couple of days. you will normally find the run time guesstimates to be well out on your new GPU for the first couple of dozen, don't worry, they will sort its life out eventually...
____________
Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

You can't mix GPU from different vendors on Vista (at least with WDDM drivers, you may get it to work using XPDM drivers),
Mixing vendors is no problem in Windows 7 or XP. (except you're got to install ATI/AMD drivers last for OpenCL to work properly on ATI/AMD devices)

MultiMonitor Support and Windows Vista

Multimonitor Support in WDDM

On Windows Vista, older XPDM drivers still work and the multi-monitor behavior with XPDM drivers hasn't changed, because the operating system uses the legacy graphics stack.

However, the Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WDDM) brings fundamental changes to the management of multiple graphics adapters and external displays. This includes a new restriction, because WDDM drivers do not support "heterogeneous multi-adapter" multi-monitor implementations. Specifically:

All graphics adapters in a system must use the same display driver model. That is, all of them should either be running XPDM or WDDM. The driver models are mutually exclusive, and Windows Vista does not allow the simultaneous loading of both an XPDM driver and a WDDM driver.

If a system has one graphics adapter with a XPDM driver and another with a WDDM driver, then Windows Vista will choose the POST device, which is the one with VGA resources. This is commonly referred to as the "VGA adapter."


If multiple graphics adapters are present in a system, all of them must use the same WDDM driver. If there are two graphics adapters with WDDM drivers from two different manufacturers, then Windows will disable one of them. The VGA adapter will be enabled, and the second device will be disabled.

Notice that XPDM drivers still support heterogeneous multi-adapter as they did in Windows XP. A user who has such a configuration working fine in Windows XP will encounter a problem when upgrading to Windows Vista. An external monitor connected to one of the graphics adapters will have no video signal, because it is disabled. An error message will appear on system boot, as described later in this article.

The solution for this problem could be as follows:

A user could force the installation of a XPDM driver for each of these devices, and therefore get heterogeneous multi-adapter multi-monitor to work as in Windows XP.

-Or-


The user could change the graphics hardware configuration by choosing multiple graphics adapters that use the same WDDM driver. Graphics adapters from the same ASIC family generally have the same graphics driver. In late 2006, each of the major graphics vendors had a single WDDM driver for all supported WDDM graphics adapters. Please consult the graphics vendor's Web site for details on their driver support.