Does Windows 7 support multiple simultaneous nVidia graphics cards with different drivers?

Posted by mckenzieg1 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by mckenzieg1
Published on 2009-09-04T17:43:50Z Indexed on 2010/04/01 21:43 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-7

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graphics-card

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nvidia

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dual-graphics-card

On one of my dev machines at work (currently running XP), I have two nVidia graphics cards:

Quadro NVS 440 (my original card, for my three primary monitors)
GeForce GTX 275 (just added, for CUDA development)

I can get both cards to work OK by installing the latest GeForce drivers, but I get some annoying-but-not-crippling display artifacts on the Quadro's screens (mostly scattered black rectanges where repainting fails for a few bits of UI in certain applications).

Under XP, this seems to be the best I can do. I can use Device Manager to supposedly install different nVidia drivers for the two cards (the latest Quadro drivers for the NVS, the latest GeForce drivers for the GTX), but I actually end up with the same driver for both, because the driver dlls all have the same names and get installed on top of one another in the system directory.

I have read that Win7 has a new video driver architecture that better supports multiple heterogeneous cards. Does anyone know if that will handle my scenario? If so, it will give me a compelling reason to get that machine on Win7 ASAP.

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