Pretty sure the answer to this was no and probably still is. There are motherboards that used to have bios settings or whatever for onboard video card disabling so I assume a bios switch or something might exist.

I would like to buy a new video card for development reasons only, as the one I have now runs all games on high so I don't need to drop 250.00 on a newer card.

I only want to buy it though, if I can toggle between my old and new card. So I have 2 benchmarks for my games performance on an old card and new card. Whether I have to restart the computer, or do something in the bios each time would be fine. I just don't want to have to plug one in, update drives, run my game + benchmark. Swap the old graphics card physically. Install drivers. Benchmark.

Is this possible to have 2 plugged in and choose between them?

Yeah, you can install multiple video cards on one PC at the same time and pick which one to use each time you run your game. I haven't done it in over a decade, but it worked fine back then.

Checklist:

- Make sure your motherboard has a free slot of the proper type.
- Make sure your power supply can handle it.
- Search around to see if anyone has had problems with the two cards you're planning to use at the same time. I've heard that some combinations confuse driver installers.
- Make sure your OS supports it. I've only used Windows, which supports multiple video cards at once. Might be different on other OSes.


Whenever your code is initializing the graphics device, there will be a way you can programmatically find out what device(s) exist, and pick the one you want to use for rendering.

(edit) Apparently, Windows 7 can even run multiple cards where each card has a different driver. Before this, Windows only supported one driver at a time, so you'd have to get cards that could share one driver.

Don't know about other versions of Windows, but my Win8.1 laptop has both a dedicated (NVidia) card and an integrated (Intel) card and switching between them can be done simply by right-clicking the executable (or shortcut) and choosing what graphics card I want from the "run with graphics processor" menu.

These guys even got SLI and Crossfire running at the same time in the same pc. So I don't think you will have much trouble, if you consider the points Nypyren mentioned.

I think you might just try disabling it in windows device manager. Vidcards are no more the magic they used to be, after Vista the drivers got streamlined.

BTW, sweet spot is at 120-180. For 250 you can easily get hi-end so you definitely don't need to drop 250 for a card and still have quite some bang.

I think you might just try disabling it in windows device manager. Vidcards are no more the magic they used to be, after Vista the drivers got streamlined.

BTW, sweet spot is at 120-180. For 250 you can easily get hi-end so you definitely don't need to drop 250 for a card and still have quite some bang.

O_O

are we talking about dollars? Euros? GBP? I wouldn't call a 250$ card High-end really, but yeah, its certainly enough to run current games on high or even ultra at 1080p...

120-180$ cards, that is below GTX 960 price level.... which is midrange IMO

Though if you are talking about used cards, yeah, Graphics cards lose value fast.... my GTX 580 that got released from duty by a GTX 970 recently might only fetch 150$ anymore if I can sell it to some miners because of the ungimped DP performance of the fermi generation.

Else I would most probably only get around 50-100$, and that card can still run most games on high at 1080p.... never buy the most expensive card of a generation

Which in turn means for people buying cards used after 2-3 years, that they can buy high end cards for the mentioned 120$ without problems....

Anyway, interesting information.... might give this a try as I have many old Cards lying around and would like to know how my builds perform on older cards. Didn't know this would be so easy....