Mult-vendor GPU driver install

[codedivine]

So I am looking into building a system with Ivy Bridge (with HD 4000 included) and a discrete GPU from either AMD or Nvidia. The HD 4000 will drive the display while the discrete card will be used solely for GPU computing.

Does anyone have experience in having multiple drivers installed? Do I need to do anything special beyond just grabbing drivers from Intel and AMD/Nvidia websites? I am NOT looking for Optimus-like switching, nor any power savings, just need the HD 4000 to be connected/driving the display at all times and discrete GPU strictly for compute.

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium.

[Forge]

It'll work fine. Was a problem under Vista initially, now back to goodness. I'm running a mixed-GPU setup similar to what you're wanting, at work. I have the HD 2000 driving my main monitor via HDMI, and a GeForce 8600GT driving two more. You might have some issues with the GPU not being fully enabled/functional without a monitor hooked to it. You can make a dummy VGA plug or just drive a monitor with it, to get it fully functional. You'd basically be doing Lucid Hydra in reverse.

Windows 7 does do some bizarre fruity stuff with multi-mon on multi-GPU. I don't fully know what's going on under the hood, but it looks like Win7 does some nifty framebuffer-copying nonsense, so that I can run primary monitor off a GTX 460, run monitors 2 and 3 off my 8600GT, and run a DX11 app on any monitor. It's kind of useful, but there's a performance hit across the board.


Anyways, for what you want, should be fine, worst case you grab a cheap LCD to hook up to your GPGPU card, to get it to full speed.