Help. Driver overwrite?

#1

Hey guys,
hopefully someone smarter than me will help me figure out what on earth is going on.

I am running a multi-GPU workstation - one Quadro 4000 and 2x GTX780ti - 3 in total.

Cinema 4D, my OS (Windows) and my display are all powered by the Quadro, both GTX are initialized by Octane for rendering only.

Funny story, soon after adding the gtx cards I started experiening some open gl crashes… for no obvious reason. This is not a plugin issue as I’ve ran the bug reports by the Octane developers and it’s been confirmed it has nothing to do with the crashes.

Even funnier, I noticed something weird in my OpenGL information bar that Cinema generates.
Please, pay attention to which driver the Quadro is actually using. What’s on the right side is a screen directly from nvidia’s website.

What I suspect - whichever card updates last, its drivers overwrite the rest. Could it be so silly? Right now it seems that the quadro card is using a “newer” driver, however it’s not made for it.

Could this be the source of the crashes? Any help, even wild guesses - it’s appreciated! :hmm:

Image

Best,
Dobs

#2

You’re not going crazy.

The long story simplified and short is that nvidia driver installs are mutually exclusive.

Quadro and GTX cards mixed together have been officially troublemakers and reportedly so through all kind of channels, that goes from developers working on CAM or scientific applications and with an nVIDIA devnet contract, to one or two statements by nVIDIA engineers here and there.

There is, supposedly, an alleged solution, which is finding one of the extremely rare GTX driver releases that seems to support both without issues, but I can’t help you on what version in the specific that would be.
It also depends on the subset of features used, so the co-existence can result in anything between being seemingly functional, to glitches, to outright disastrous stability.

#3

Thanks for the reply. Appreciate the time.

I cannot believe nvidia letf this thing hanging for so long. These are all nvida componenets, why would they allow this to happen. Nearly a thousand-dollar cards should work stright out of the box, you’d think they thought about this. Hunting working drivers down is beyond what’s practical in a production environment. Stupid thing. :shrug:

#4

To be honest I don’t know how much of it is nVIDIA’s fault, and how much is an issue with the deployment options of device drivers in windows.
I suspect their artificial distinction between quadro and gtx cards coupled with the “all in one” approach might be at fault, but it’s an uneducated guess.
I heard mixing the firepro and radeon cards and drivers leads to the same (issues), but that might be they just make the same mistakes.

Honestly though, the gtx780s will so smoke a Q4K, or even a QK4K, that in your place I’d just try to sell the quadro and replace it with a third 780. Massive win on all fronts and no issues.

#5

IMHO, dump the quadro 4000 and either use one of the gf cards or throw an additional 780 in there if you dont want to slow down a render card. You can still get £200 for the quadro if you sell it, and as far as c4d is concerned, a £200 geforce card will work faster than the quadro ever did. £200 gets you a 760 with 4 gigs ram which is perfectly suitable.

#6

I’ve managed to set it up by manually isntalling the drivers on per/device basis. Driver versions in the device manager and Cinema 4D seem to be displayed properly now. I hope this is the case under the hood as well.

I’d love love love to get rid of the quadro. Unfortunately, I have space left for a single-slot graphics card only. All GeForce models are dual-slot. How about that… :arteest: