Graphics question .. :

I have an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP 64 MB graphics card & an onboard NVidia Geforece 4MX graphics chip which uses main memory for memory ... .

What I want to do is to be able to use both the onboard GPU & the AGP card at the same time .

Tried it before .. but what happens is that if I put the AGP card into the system the onboard graphics chip seems to become invisible .

I know its possible to use e.g. two graphics cards of the same type at once ..
but does anyone know how to get onboard & AGP running at the same time .. or is it not possible ?

By the way ... SuSE 9.2 which uses Xorg 6.8.1 & 2.6 kernel in my case ... .


Thanks alot for any kind of idea ... :-)

wini_g,

If the Radeon card is AGP and the onboard GPU also uses the AGP bus, the you won't be able to use both. When you plug the Radeon into the AGP slot, the mainboard shuts down the onboard video. To the best of my knowledge, two cards cannot share the AGP bus.

Hope this helps.

I thought the AGP(? advanced graphics port) is the slot for graphics cards & that onboard hraphics would use something else ?

It sounds like you do have and AGP slot on your motherboard, but the onboard video makes use of the AGP bus as well. AGP is single target/single master, meaning you can only have one AGP device running on your system. Most (if not all) motherboards with onboard AGP adapters will disable them when they find another adapter in the AGP slot. Here is a link with a short AGP overview

http://www.sysopt.com/agp.html

Your best bet, if you want dual displays, is to either invest in a dual head AGP card, or add a PCI video card to the system. PCI video cards are multi-target/multi-master meaning you could have as many as you wanted. Personaly I use a Matrox G450 dual head, but I don't do much 3D stuff.

Thanks a lot 4 your reply .
Unfortunately this of course means I cant use them together .
Didn't know that so Ive learned something .