Microsoft gets nVidia’s SLi and ATi’s Crossfire working in Vista
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Ever since Vista came out, owners of ATi and nVidia graphic cards have been complaining about the lack of WHQL certified drivers which has now been rectified, at least on the nVidia side but one of the problems with the drivers still existed, no multi-GPU support. Microsoft has released a fix for that problem.
It seems that the reason SLi or Crossfire dual GPU solutions weren’t working in Vista was because the operating system failed to send instructions to the second GPU so both cards were still functioning as one board. The purpose of SLi and Crossfire is to allow two graphic cards to function as one.
Neither ATi nor nVidia could have done anything different as this was a problem with Vista itself, they could have released driver after driver and it would not have fixed the problem. Microsoft has heard you, good people of the world and have (sort of) released a fix for Crossfire and SLi not working in Vista.
This problem is described in this Microsoft support article but be forewarned, it was not kind enough to provide a link to download the update. If you suffer from this problem on Vista, you will have to contact Microsoft support and (I suppose) reference the support article or just forgo that whole process and download the update from a third party site, Guru 3D which has so kindly provided a direct download link.
In addition to having this Microsoft update installed, it also wouldn’t hurt to nab the latest Vista drivers from ATi or nVidia based on which side of the fence you are on. Note that most drivers listed on the sites are not applicable to mobile solutions (in laptops).
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