cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Archives Discussions

Gunter
Journeyman III

HD 6990 together with on-board VGA

Hi,

I'm trying to use a mainboard with on-board graphics (ASPEED AST2050) for driving the display together with an HD 6990 solely for computing. The machine runs Windows 7 64-bit Enterprise edition and Catalyst version 11.8. The driver for the on-board graphics is the standard Windows built-in VGA driver.

However, this doesn't work. FindNumDevices reports 0. Catalyst Control Center can't be started. In the Windows device manager, I see all graphics devices listed nicely and "working properly".

Is there a solution?

Thx

Gunter

 

0 Likes
6 Replies
corry
Adept III

ha, I think you inadvertantly answered one of my questions.  I've heard you either need a monitor plugged in or a dummy adapter (to make the card think it has a monitor plugged in) to use it as a compute device only, but I hadn't heard of anyone complaining, so I thought it might have not been true....Guess I should get my dummy adapters on order.  Pretty sure they're just a resistor with the connector, so they should be cheap

0 Likes

is it working when you plug in monitor? also AMD recently made windows driver to work in headless mode. so you shouldnt need dummy plug anymore.

0 Likes
Gunter
Journeyman III

It doesn't matter whether or not a monitor is connected. I have tried several methods, to no avail so far.

The method giving the least amount of errors and complaints is this:

- I connect a monitor to both the on-board graphics and the HD6990

- in the BIOS, I have on-board graphics enabled

- I let the machine boot into Windows

- I install Catalyst

- I reboot and log on to Windows again.

Then first thing I see on the mainboard graphics is a lengthy error message from Catalyst saying that the driver is incompatible. The other monitor stays dark. In the device manager I see the onboard graphics as well as the HD6990 working properly. Windows appears to be okay with it. Nevertheless, FindNumDevices reports 0.

It appears as if the AMD device driver stops cooperating as soon as it detects another non-AMD VGA chip. It should, however, at least provide the infrastructure for GPGPU-computing. Is there no way that I can trick it into doing this?

CAL is accessible only if I disable on-board graphics in the BIOS. But that's not an option, because it's a rack-mount chassis which is supposed to output the desktop over Ethernet (from the onboard graphics).

0 Likes

Ah, I should have read more closely....Your onboard graphics isn't an AMD as well.  Look up running nVidia and AMD.  There's a way in 7, and it onvolves running one of the display drivers with XP drivers, and the other with Vista/7 drivers.  I am guessing in your case, it would probably be most advantageous to run the onboard with XP drivers...

I don't have 7 on my dev machine, so I didn't try it, I just ripped the tesla and quadro cards out, and popped the 6990 in, but people said it was 100% doable in 7.

0 Likes

you should try uninstall catalyst driver. disable onboard graphic. boot into widnows install catalyst again. ensure that it works. after that you should try enable onboard graphic again.

0 Likes

Honestly, windows was designed with one display in mind...this GPGPU stuff has turned that design decision on its head!  Think about it, normally all drawing API calls, eventually map to driver calls right?  So if you have monitors connected to each display, now the system has to actually determine which video driver to call into.  It only works in 7 because they put the XP backwards compatibility stuff in.  I run vista, and tried to get it to install and use 2 seperate drivers at the same time....it was impossible.  All the forums said 7 could do it with XP mode drivers, and vista/7 mode drivers.  I haven't tried, but reports are it works fine, of course assuming your graphics card works.  However, your error messages match exactly what I saw trying to run the 2 types of cards at once...

0 Likes