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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.

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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
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 6:31
  • You could check out the options nvidea configuration offers. I believe I have done this once in their settings. Looks like technical program
    – Martijn
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 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.

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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
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 11:28
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    In theory games using Vulkan/DirectX 12 can utilize multiple GPUs without SLI (even from different vendors)
    – Nazar554
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 12:42
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    with DX12 it is possible. this is called multiadapter
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 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
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 15:46
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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
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 19:35

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