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After Windows 10 Fall Update you see all of your GPUs in the Taskmanager:

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When I play a game, only one GPU is used, the other one is idle.

Question: When I reach 100% with my GeForce GTX 760 is it possible to use the unused power of my Intel HD Graphics to get a few more fps - even if there is no monitor attached to it?

Or Gaming on the one GPU, video transcoding on the other one.

Toshi
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    With my current understanding it's really unlikely that you will be able to do that. Even two graphics card that are connected using a SLI bridge did have considerable problems with synchronization in the past. – Seth Oct 24 '17 at 06:31
  • You could check out the options nvidea configuration offers. I believe I have done this once in their settings. Looks like technical program – Martijn Oct 24 '17 at 15:01

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Short answer is: "No, you cannot combine Nvidia, AMD, Intel, etc different vendor GPUs".

Longer answer is that you can combine two or more GPUs from the same manufacturer if they are supported.

Ie. you can use two Nvidia GeForce 1080 cards in SLI mode or two AMD R9 290X cards togethe, etc. In past you could even use two different model cards; AMD HD 5970 and HD 5870, for example - and it would default to the speed of the slower one.

Using two cards in Windows is tricky and requires vendor drivers, support for specific games (or you're just as likely to run slower than when using just one card), etc.

DocWeird
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  • Good answer, thanks. Is it at least possible to use the GPU power of the unattached GPU in any other way? – Toshi Oct 24 '17 at 07:27
  • In gaming? Theoretically you could force another game to run on that GPU, if you're using two screens or playing windowed. Or you could use that GPU for video rendering, virtual currency mining, etc (not very effectively, mind you). But in most gaming situations your GeForce is going to beat that Intel HD Graphics GPU hands down - so in short of rendering FullHD video or something similar while playing with the other GPU, I would forget about it. – DocWeird Oct 24 '17 at 07:32
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    On Nvidia cards, other than SLI, you could also use a lower card for PhysX calculations while using the higher one for the rest. I'm currently using a 960 for PhysX alongside a 1080 for everything else and it works quite well. Just don't try to use a really low end card with a high end one. I tried a 430 alongside 560 once and it just slowed the whole thing down instead of helping. – John Hamilton Oct 24 '17 at 11:28
  • @JohnHamilton thanks for sharing your experience. Helpful! – Toshi Oct 24 '17 at 12:29
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    In theory games using Vulkan/DirectX 12 can utilize multiple GPUs without SLI (even from different vendors) – Nazar554 Oct 24 '17 at 12:42
  • @Nazar554 I think either Nvidia or AMD (or both) has some protection against the other vendor's drivers being present on your machine. It can be bypassed by using a custom driver (yeah those are available) but they're not really reliable. – John Hamilton Oct 24 '17 at 13:26
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    with [DX12 it is possible. this is called multiadapter](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn933253.aspx) – magicandre1981 Oct 24 '17 at 15:18
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    @JohnHamilton - seriously? this would be an anticompetitive practice that hardly seems legal - and seems unlikely that Microsoft would condone it (through the Windows hardware certification process). Can you point to anything about this? – davidbak Oct 24 '17 at 15:46
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    @JohnHamilton I run a machine at work with multiple GPUs from different vendors. There is nothing preventing them from having their drivers on here togather. – Logarr Oct 24 '17 at 16:46
  • @Toshi "Is it possible to use the GPU in any other way?" Yes, you could run [SETI at home](https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cuda.php), or [mine for bitcoin](https://guiminer.org/). Many of these projects only work for a specific brand of GPU, though, and Intel HD is not a popular one to implement. – jpaugh Oct 24 '17 at 18:02
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    In theory a gamedev could write some sort of computations in OpenCL and offload them to a secondary GPU if available instead of running them on the CPU or main GPU; but I'm not aware of any titles that have done so. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Oct 24 '17 at 19:35
  • @davidbak if you're not running DirectX12 then the cards won't work together, I had tried to have a gtx9600 with a radeon card (this was way back, I think 10+ years ago) and the nvidia card would just not work when the radeon was present (I am still talking about gaming, not for separate tasks). I can't find the driver site that provided the custom drivers now (there was a site that provided a Radeon + Nvidia driver combo) but it was definitely there and I had decided against trying it out because people were saying it could go very wrong. – John Hamilton Oct 25 '17 at 05:02
  • Years ago you could use a ATI (AMD) card as your primary card and Nvidia card just for PhysX. This was back in the GTS8800 days, or so. Then Nvidia disabled this in their drivers and the only way you could do it was to use third party software / drivers. – DocWeird Oct 25 '17 at 06:32