Mixing FirePro and Radeon in the same system

[haplo602]

Hi all

Recently I got a cheap FirePro v4800. Nice little card for 3D modeling and programming, however gaming performance lacks. I also got into bitcoin mining and the 80Mhash/s is nice but slow

I thought of getting a Radeon HD5850 or 5830 as a compute device and gaming card to complement the FirePro. However the Catalyst driver refuses to work with a FirePro card and AMD support told me that the same will happen with the CatalystPro (i.e. Radeon cards will not work with the Pro driver).

Does anybody here have experience with either mixing Radeon/FirePro cards in the same machine or modifying drivers to accept both type of cards ?

My distro is gentoo64 on a dual opteron system. The board lacks AMD-Vi (Nforce 3600 Pro socket F), so using virtualisation is not that easy for this (but possible).

[612io]

The same: Mixing FirePro and Radeon in the same system

I have the same problem. I Got a V4800 but I would like add a nice card for gaming later on.

Now, you already a bit further. Did you try to to install both the Catalyst and Catalyst Pro drivers?

I see tour doing this on Linux, do you have Windows?

[haplo602]

Linux only here .... Was thinking about virtualising the other card to a windows instance, but my mmainboard does not support PCI passthrough properly.

Anyway I think both drivers under Linux will have file collisions and worse, kernel collisions. Also I'd have to start 2 X sessions, one for each driver.

[612io]

Well, I'm going to test the dual driver set-up this saturday... but on a windows machine. I let you know how it worked anyway.


Extra: I don't know why this is such a strange topic. You can find almost nothing about this subject on the web. We can't be the only people with this problem or question? Maybe 99,999% of al CAD'ders aren't intrested in games or something .

[haplo602]

I guess the CAD people can buy the higher models so no problem with performance. It's the hobby folks that get the short end.

[haplo602]

anyway I am already trying to get rid of the card to buy a regular radeon. it's no use to a hobbyist to buy a firepro when for the same price I can get a much powerfull radeon and for the little bit of 3D work it will do (also Blender is not picky about consumer cards anyway).

[haplo602]

actualy it works

so now I'm pissed off. I sold the firepro and got a 5830. To my surprise, the CatalystPro driver started just fine, only difference was the unsupported HW watermark. everything worked fine.

conclusion: CatalystPro allows mixing FirePro and Radeon in the same system, just the driver needs to be recent enough to support your Radeon of choice. Also standard editing to get rid of the watermark will work.

one unknown is this: will the pro features work on the FirePro if the Radeon is present ? Can't test it now.

[psiZA]

conclusion: CatalystPro allows mixing FirePro and Radeon in the same system, just the driver needs to be recent enough to support your Radeon of choice. Also standard editing to get rid of the watermark will work.

I'm desperately trying to get a FirePro v5800 and Radeon 5770 to work together in the same PC (Ubuntu).
Are you sure that you can use the catalystPro driver for something like the Radeon 5770? I've downloaded and installed the latest driver from ati's site but it only picks up the FirePro under aticonfig --list-devices. When I install the Radeon driver, it only picks up the 5770.

Any ideas how I can get both to work in the same PC?

[haplo602]

I'm desperately trying to get a FirePro v5800 and Radeon 5770 to work together in the same PC (Ubuntu).
Are you sure that you can use the catalystPro driver for something like the Radeon 5770? I've downloaded and installed the latest driver from ati's site but it only picks up the FirePro under aticonfig --list-devices. When I install the Radeon driver, it only picks up the 5770.

Any ideas how I can get both to work in the same PC?

Don't know about Ubuntu. I had the 8.85 version of the CatalystPro installed. After I replaced the FirePro with the Radeon in the same slot, it booted graphics with the unsupported HW watermark and all acceleration and such was fine. So I suggest that you install the firepro and replace it with the radeon (only one card in the same system at any time). if that works, then you just need to find a guide to edit the PCI IDs for the catalyst driver (I guess both drivers are largely the same).