Cycles Compute Device, 2x GPU option is gone when having 3x GPU cards. #37717

System Information
Win8.1 , nVidia GTX 580 (3 cards)

Blender Version
Broken: Blender 2.69 from buildbot 2013-12-05
Worked: Blender 2.XX rXXXXXX

Short description of error
Under User Preferences > System > Compute Device: I have only the options of using all 3 cards,
or selecting individual cards.

There used to be an option to use 2x GPUs and spare the main GPU0 that drivers OS and Displays.

This is system critical for me, using all 3 cards rendering full HD and my GPU0 reaches 80deg C and the displays go white and I have to reboot.

Exact steps for others to reproduce the error
Based on a (as simple as possible) attached .blend file with minimum amount of steps
Just check Compute Device on a machine with more than 2 cards, if x2 GPU shows up.

Changed status to: 'Open'

Added subscriber: @MartinLindelof

Added subscriber: @brecht

Was this a change in Blender or in your operating system or graphics driver? Please test with older Blender versions to verify.

The way this works is that cycles tries to detect if one of your graphics card is used for display, and then it offers a configuration with that card excluded. Maybe on Windows 8.1 that doesn't work.

Okay, there is no way this could be a setting? Exclude GPU0 use rest.

I have to try and use older versions to see if it has ever worked on Win8.1 I was running Ubuntu before and there for sure it worked.

N/A in 2.68 on Win8.1
Ok,probably was so it was only available in Ubuntu.

Can I give a suggestion to have an option to spare the GPU0 device for OS/Display ?
If more than 1 GPUs are available.

Added subscriber: @cheleb

I can confirm this on Win7 64bit NVIDIA driver 331.xx. The last working driver was 327.23. We have several machines with multiple cards in our studio and all of them show this behavior with the newest driver.

I also agree with @MartinLindelof here that it would be much more comfortable to just exclude cards from rendering via checkbox in the blender preferences panel - if at all possible.
The NVIDIA driver somehow doesn't remember which cards were excluded from CUDA processing after driver updates and now is finally completely bogus after the latest update - which is kind of annoying when you have to reconfigure each machine at every driver update.

Changed status from 'Open' to: 'Archived'

It's on my todo list to improve graphics card configuration for 2.70, to allow you to select individual cards and enable/disable them. This is not considered a bug at the moment however.

Added subscriber: @STEP-ANI-MOTION

Added subscriber: @kojiroakasama

Hi, I was just wondering if this feature has been added yet, or has there been a workaround

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Cycles Compute Device, 2x GPU option is gone when having 3x GPU cards. #37717