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Running Video Cards in Parallel
G.A. Wells writes "Ars Technica has the scoop on a new, Alienware-developed graphics subsystem called Video Array that will let users run two PCI-Express graphics cards in parallel on special motherboards. The motherboard component was apparently developed in cooperation with Intel. Now if I could only win the lottery."
...Microsoft announced that Clippy had broken the before unheard of 2,000 fps barrier.
PCI-Express? What happened to AGP?
Seriously, I've been out of the PC market for too long. Alas, poor wallet. I had cash flow, Horatio.
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This brings computers to be more human-like, since we have 2 eyes (most of us), soon every desktop will have to monitors!
Mouhahahah!!!
Here we go again!
Hell, I couldn't care less about parallel processing for the video cards.
I want tri-head or quad-head video, but with at least AGP speeds. You can do it now, but only with PCI cards getting involved.
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Didnt the early voodoo cards allow something similar to this ? I know they had a pass through from your 'normal' video card but i seem to remember the ability of running more and they would each do alternating scan lines.
The PR mess is light on information and I don't have flash to view their site. Can someone give some technical information? e.g. How does this work? What does it really do? What can a typical gamer actually expect (surely it doesn't just double your power by sending every other frame to each card)?
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Now you can play solitary and minesweaper at the same time on a maximized screen. :)
I think it is great that a company has the will to do something like this, even if it doesn't catch on. It's cool to try something new, instead of just hanging back and doing the tried and true.
I'll admit I haven't yet read the whole article, but even though it says that it isn't tied to any one video card, that doesn't say to me that it can have multiple disparate cards. If it is doing something along the lines of SLI, I would guess that the speeds would need to be matched between the two cards. And that would imply having two of the same card, whatever card the user chooses.
But maybe not... maybe it's the advent of asymetric multi video processing.
So they run sound cards in parallel too?
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The author of the Ars article seems to be under the impression that this would allow one to use two graphics cards from different manufacturers in the same machine. The most likely meaning in the material he provided was that people could use this with any manufacturer's cards, as long as the cards were identical. I doubt there could be that kind of cooperation in task-splitting implmented at the driver level given drivers from two different (competing!) manufacturers.
Welll, there go my savings. Who needs food anyway!
Alienware didn't invent this
the PCI and PCI Express have had this written into spec
AGP does too, but when was the last time you saw dual AGP slots on a mobo? (they do exist)
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So what technology did Alienware create here? None..
So they have one of the first MB's with two PCI Express slots. Big deal, soon MB's will contain many PCI-Express slots. Hopefully a lot more than 2.
All you really need is some way to copy the data in memory from one card to another.
Easy solution? Several high-speed serial connections in parallel between the two cards. With a little bit of circuitry on the card dedicated to keeping the data identical.
Or, with a little bit of a performance hit, you could keep each section of RAM separate, and route misses over the cables.
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The way I'm reading it either it makes cards from 2 diff manufactuers work together to display video from one card twice as fast ie beowulf clustering.
Or it make to diff cards support dual screen? But I've been doing that on my computer for years so that couldn't be it.
From the article: "The answers may have to wait until Q3/Q4". There are no performance numbers, no real statements of how it works, nothing much at all. Just wow, gee whiz, dual graphics cards in parallel. What exactly does "in parallel" mean? That's not even addressed.
Some things I thought of immediately reading this, great - two displays each driven by a separate card, or, better yet, quad displays driven by two cards. Nope, not a word about either possibility. The implication of the PR/article is that 3D graphics will be processed faster. How? Do they have some nifty way of combining two standard off the shelf graphics card signals into a single monitor? (Hint, it's hard enough getting the monitor to properly synch up with a single high performance graphics card!)
Since when does ArsTechnica merely regurgitate PRs? This was 99.999% vacuum.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
for Longhorn?
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In fact all the first generation PCI-Express chipsets only support one x16 PCIe for graphics controller.
I doubt that Intel is going to make a 2 port one especially for Alienware.
So I expect it means that the second graphics card is plugged into a x4 or x1 PCIe connector.
Anyway, this is nothing special, it is all part of the specification. Hell, you could have two AGP v3 slots in a machine working at the same time - how do you think ATI's integrated graphics can work at the same time as an inserted AGP card's?
When Windows 98 came out, there was a new feature (that before had pretty much been limited to Matrox cards with a special driver) that would let you use multiple PCI and AGP video cards in the same motherboard with multiple monitors. At first glance, this seems like pretty much the same idea.
The article seems to claim that the cards will be able to split processing duties, even if they're not from the same manufacturer. That particular claim seems very dubious to me for some reason. Other than integrating two PCI-Express slots on a motherboard, I'm not sure Alienware has achieved anything here. Of course, should Alienware want to send me one of these to try out, I'll be happy to post my review on Slashdot.
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I'm pretty sure it was alienware, when the voodoo 3 was really, really new I saw a little blurb in what I think was a computer gaming world about a system that would run up to 4 voodoo 3 cards. It didn't use SLI like the old voodoo 2s, but would split the screen up among the cards, a 2x2 grid with 4 cards, the blurb went on about crazy quake 2 framerates I think.
The next gen card from nvidia is supposed to require two (unchained/direct) power connectors and a 300w supply.
You'll probably not only need the lottery to get this, you'll need to win another to pay your power bill every month...
RTFA.
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I belive you need to RTFA, this isnt about dual head setups. one head, two cards
TIAEAE!
It looks like the same thing as Metabyte PGC - and Alienware was supposed to be the roll-out partner for that.
Nothing wrong with it, though - PGC actually did work, and was previewed independently by several people (I think Sharky?).
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Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Can anyone show me an upcoming motherboard with two 16x PCI Express slots? From what I've read most (all? except for this one) will only have one 16x PCI express slot for the video card and then a couple 1x, 2x, and 4x slots PCI-Express slots for everything else. The reason I wanted to upgrade to a new computer this winter is in the hope that I could have two high-end video cards in the same system (instead of having one high-end agp and one mid-range PCI).
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Now that we have infinite frame rate, someone should write game that I want to play. The other day I spent 2 hours waching GamingTV (which shows 5 minute clips froma various games 24/7, and find out that all games look almost the same. You are standing in the center of the screen (with sword, magic or skateboard) and move around killing peaople or putting "magic" to them (to take "health units" out of them, of course). Last interesting thing I saw was "Bridge Builder" 4 years ago. It was ZX-like game. I think that if there was nVidia cards back in 80ies and early 90ties, Lemmings would be game with main lemming in the center of the screen, walking around rooms and halls to find "magic bottle" and distroy evil enemy. Thanks god I was kid before nVidia.
I think the big question we need to ask is do we really need multiple monitor setups?
Besides the obvious issue of hardware cost of multiple graphics cards and multiple monitors, you also have to consider desktop space issues. Even with today's flat-panel LCD's, two monitors will hog a lot of desktop space, something that might not be desirable in many cases.
I think there is a far better case for a single widescreen display instead of multiple displays. Besides having a lot less impact on hogging desktop space widescreen displays allow you to see videos in the original aspect ratio more clearly and also allow for things like seeing more of a spreadsheet, clearer preview of work you do with a desktop publishing program and (in the case of a pivotable display) make the reading of web pages easier and/or single page work with a DTP program easier. Is it small wonder why people so much liked the Apple Cinema Display that uses a 1.85 to 1 (approximately) aspect ratio?
Is this compatible with Brook and other general-purpose GPU programming techniques? The use I see for it is this:
Imagine an openmosix cluster of dual-processor machines that run bioinformatic calculations and simulations. Lots of matrix math and such - pretty fast (and definitely a lot faster than a single researcher's machine).
Now imagine the same cluster but each machine has 2 or 4 dual-head graphics cards and each algorithm that can be created in Brook or similar is. That gives each machine up to 2 CPU's and maybe 8 GPU's that may be used for processing. The machines are clustered so a group of ~12 commodity machines (1 rack) could have 24 CPU's and 96 GPU's. Now that would be some serious computing power - and relatively cheap too (since 1-generation old dual-head cards are ~$100-$150).
By the way, does anyone know if there is any work going on to create toolkits for Octave and/or MatLab which would utilize the processing power of a GPU for matrix math or other common calculations?
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That's PCI-X. PCI-X is different than PCI-Express.
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The 2nd best graphics-related company ever (Behind SGI) Had this technology back in '97.
Actually, all the Voodoo Line, the best 3D Card ever, had this tech called SLI, that let you use 2 cards in parallel. All you need was 2 Voodoos of the same kind and a flat cable. You could buy the cable, but the pinout was just exactly the same as the one used for 3 1/2 Floppy Drivers, so if you cutted the part that went to the 2nd drive (The one with a few pins switched), you could make it really cheap, besides the cost of those cards.
All voodoos had 2 units, one for textures, the other to do all the math, this way, you could use 1 voodoo to do the math, and the other to process textures.
Nowdays, if you have 2 voodoos 2, and 500Mhz, you can easily take 70 FPS on Quake 3.
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discrete parallel graphics processing has been around for a while. The most notable example of it is probably 3DFX and their Voodoo-2 cards. However, there's a problem with this tactic, namely, in the "diminishing gains" department.
:)
So here's the question:
-How is pixel processing going to work? For a given frame, there is vertex, texture information, as well as the interesting little shader routines that work their magic on these pixels. How are you going to split up this workload between the 2 GPUs? you can't split a frame up between the GPUs, that would break all texture operations and there would be considerable overhead with the GPUs swapping data over the PCI bus. *MAYBE* having each gpu handle a frame in sequence would do the trick, but, again, it's a dicey issue.
It would appear to me that this dual-card graphics rendering is quite similiar to dual-gpu graphics cards. Except, where in a graphics card you can handle cache/memory coherency and logic arbiting easily due to the proximity of the GPUs, with this discrete solution you run the problem of having to use the PCI Express bus, which, as nice as it is, is certainly not that much faster than AGP.
So I say, power to you Alienware. If you can pull it off with Nvidia, ATi et all, great. It's too bad the cynical side of me thinks this idea reeks of those blue crystals marketing departments love
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You are running a bunch of video cards INDEPENDANT of each other. Clearly NOT THE SAME THING...
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They might be able to make this work for games but I'm personally more interested by the simple fact that Intel chipsets will support dual PCI Express graphics buses. Hopefully this will be possible on a reasonably proces mobo.
Having 3 slots would be ideal but I won't say no to 2 GFX cards so I can drive two monitors from two independent graphics cards at last.
It doesn't say how this technology will combine the two cards and whether it will need software support from the games. Hopefully it won't but the devil is in the details. I'm pretty skeptical about this at the moment. We need more details on the implementation.
Thank would mean 3-4 GPU cards, not to mention the overhead for running them.
No Thanks, Make mine a mac, I have everything now what I've seen them planning for Longhorn. Feels like I'm back in 1984 waiting to see what Micro$oft copies from the mac... AGAIN...
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I'm going back to ISA...
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i had dual voodoo 2 cards that were linked together with a special cable to make them run in SLI (scan line interlacing) mode. quake certainly ran a lot faster once i got the second one installed.
Okay, we have a GeForce and a Radeon in parallel. What's the communication protocol that's running over PCI Express that allows them to do that?
Something tells me you need special drivers AND/OR a standardized graphic card accellerator protocol just to pull it off, otherwize you're stuck with two of the same cards.
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I had this back with my Voodoo2! Man... boy was I the awesome dude back then =)
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How? Do they have some nifty way of combining two standard off the shelf graphics card signals into a single monitor? (Hint, it's hard enough getting the monitor to properly synch up with a single high performance graphics card!)
Duplicate data stream (should be doable in hardware), have them render half each (every 2nd scanline?) and merge them with a trivial buffer (keep two bools, one "firsthalf=done/not done, secondhalf=done/not done"). You'd limit yourself to the minimum of the two, but since they each paint nearly the same (one scanline off) the performance should be near a 100% doubling.
Basicly, it's going to be an expensive design involving some already expensive cards. But it's definately doable.
Kjella
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I used to do this with my Quantum3D Obsidian graphics boards years ago (at the time when 3Dfx meant something to gamers). :)
What's a beltway? Is that an "East Coast" thing? Or is it a "Europe" thing? We have freeways out here in California.
That computer sounds great. Now if they can only make it with dual power supplies. One 550W to run 2 GeForce 6800 Ultras and another for the rest of the computer.
Let us not forget that nVidia and ATI both produce chipsets. Multiple graphics card purchases per system would be a dream for them, and they can help in a direct manner. Although there are not many (read as 'maybe a dozen worldwide') boards with dual AGP, the PCI-Express standard will lead to much easier multi-GPU setups. Also, the newest ATI chipsets with embedded GPUs support multi-monitor if an ATI card is used in the empty AGP slot, so you know that these guys already have to have agendas for PEG in mind.
Not PCI-X, but Matrox has offered quad-headed machines for years.
For those who don't want it for gaming (ie, don't want to blow a few hundred for the latest and greatest multi-headed AGP card), throw in a few extra el-cheapo PCI cards. Win2K supported up to ten heads - Only one AGP, obviously, but although it can't run as the boot display, both Windows and Linux (X, anyway) can make it the primary after startup so your games will run on it. XP supports even more than that (up to 255, I believe?).
On my Windows development machine, I use a 5+ year old Trident PCI card for the second head, and an older Geforce (3? low-end 4? Don't really care, it works) as the primary. I keep WinAmp, Task Manager, Calculator (a nice graphing one, not the 'doze default), and SI's TCPMon (a network connection monitor that looks much like TaskMan) on the second head, with my actual dev IDE open on the primary. On the rare occasions when I want to play a graphics-intensive game (I far prefer RTS to FPS), it works perfectly. Good frame rates, no glitches (that wouldn't have happened anyway). I do run a single-monitor screen saver I wrote (I've made it publically available on my homepage), that uses a moving-windows style saver so I can see its contents without worying about showing a static screen for too long. I also use a mouse corral (don't recall the name, do a Google search), to keep the mouse from leaving the primary display while playing a fullscreen game (that will cause glitches, just don't go there). Overall, it works great, and that PC doesn't even have a PCI-X bus.
So, not really news, I'd have to say. Someone managed to do with a new tech what we've had the ability to do with the previous gen of hardware. Whoop-de-do. "In other news, the sun has continued to burn hydrogen for the 4.6 billionth year, making a new record for our solar system!".
I wonder if this machine will come with dual 450W power supplies to power the dual high end NVidia GeForce 6 cards...
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Multiple video outputs is definitely a step in the right direction for a lot of exciting developments is visualization. Gamers rejoice.
Apple's is 16:10. Not that I quite figured out why, but TVs seem to be 16:9, Monitors 16:10. Now, if only there was HDTV content near me (HDTV broadcasts? None of the national broadcasters at least. HD-DVD? Still up in the blue. HDTV newsgroups *cough*? Too large for a measly broadband line).
I just hope that we in Europe can *please* have HDTVs and none of those fucking stupid region codes, yes? Or do I have to wait for DeCSS2 before I can buy any of the special offers??? (ever notice how those with no codes are always more?)
And yeah, I wouldn't mind having a huge TV to double as my monitor either... hehehe. Except if that goatse.cx guy shows up in HDTV while reading slashdot...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is a little off-topic, a little on-topic.
Is it possible to run a monitor and output to a television through the same machine without a special motherboard.
I want to build a video jukebox, with an interface on the monitor, and the videos playing on the TV. Is this possible with a decent video card? Any suggestions?
This interview with homelan goes into alot more info.
http://www.homelanfed.com/index.php?id=23264
255 Displays?!?!?!
Good god - what do you have in that thing? A small nuclear power plant and a case the size of my car?
It's about time we were able to install more than one video card. Being just another PCI device I should be allowed to install as many as I have slots if I wanted. Same goes for sound cards too. This would actually make a PC useful for video and audio production beyond the home hobbyist/consumer market.
...video cards already handled frame rendering asynchronously from the game engine. IOW the driver just caches all the commands (along with the corresponding data) that correspond to a frame and then spits them out onto the bus later in one burst. Just put something in between DX and the video driver (a sort of "pass-through driver") that sends one set of frame commands to one card and the next set of frame commands to the other, effectively interleaving the frames instead of the scanlines. 'course you'd need a special cable to alternate the video signals or simply enough bandwidth to move the rendered frame from one card to the other, and PCIe appears to have the bandwidth. You'd obviously need to sync the textures between the two cards. Dunno how you'd keep the state of the shader programs consistent between cards without fully processing each frame on each card, but then again I don't know enough about the programs to say for sure that would be a problem. Maybe the shader specs are such that they don't save state between frames?
Ati's Terry Makedon says: "Something big is coming for CATALYST in the next 2-3 months. It will take graphic drivers to a brand new level, and of course will be another ATI first. It will be interesting to see how long before other companies will copy the concept after we launch it."
Hmmm... just in time for PCI Express and it's not something specifc to Ati's hardware.
You've missed the point. Multi head is fine and has been around for ages.. 8 years ago I used to use a EGA monitor attached to a card for debugging. This is using the GPU of multiple cards to crunch the numbers for a single display. Very different.
There's also an in depth interview up at HomeLAN, which talks more about the specs of the X2 systems, along with how Alienware's going to handle powering and cooling the beast.
From reading the press releases, it doesn't look like this is related to multiheaded systems. I didn't see any mention of two monitors anywhere in the releases. It looks like something different, although technical details are pretty light. My first thought was maybe a way to switch between multiple video cards without opening the case. But, from reading it, it more seems like it;s a way to use more than one video card to drive a single display. It's kinda like the Vodoo SLI stuff, only this is a generic solution that works for any brand O card. Could be cool. Literally getting the best of ATI and Nvidia at the same time. I like the sound of it!
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It's possible to design and build GPUs that will play together to provide higher performance graphics. The Apple 3D Quickdraw Accelerator Card, from the early PowerPC days, does exactly that. If you get two, drawing speed nearly doubles. That device was more of a coprocessor, closer to the CPU than a modern GPU. It didn't drive the display; it just pushed bits into display memory elsewhere.
Dynamic Pictures, before they tanked, made the Oxygen line of boards, with one to four GPUs. Those units tiled the screen, with each GPU working on different tiles. The screen would break up into a checkerboard when the device was having problems, so the division of labor was quite clear.
Softimage, in their heyday, once showed a system at SIGGRAPH which was running the mental ray renderer on two 6' racks of machines with custom accelerator chips, so you could do final-quality rendering in real time. That was too pricey even for Hollywood, but very nice to watch.
Frankly, though, I could care less about using a pair of cards to crunch graphics faster. I'd rather have more displays. I want PCI express so I can have a quad head setup with all the screens running decently fast. The only way to do this now is with PCI cards which aren't that fast. Actually, I think nVidia made a Quadro4 card that did four displays at decent speed, but it wanted a 64 bit PCI slot. Ah well.
From a non-gaming point I'd rather have more room for stuff than have my desktop refresh faster than it already does. From a gaming point I'd rather have a game that engages me and is fun than have it concentrate solely on graphics to the point it needs two massive cards.
On the other hand, it might allow decent single screen performance on low cost hardware for gaming and switch modes to multi-screen on the desktop. A boost like that would always be welcome, but the article seems a little scarce on details.
If not now, when?
The routing circuitry could make two copies of data requested by the GPU. Changes only occur on one copy, until a given number of other read requests occur. At that point, the old copy is freed.
Remote requests are always read from the old copy.
At high enough framerates, you can exceed the refresh rate of your display. In such cases, old data won't be as noticable. That doesn't solve the problem on high-refresh-rate displays, though.
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In the form of XGI Dual Volari V8 Ultra, which is nothing but a joke. There's also the ATI-based E&S SimFusion, which won't be of much use in gaming crowd.
3Dlabs did it too with Wildcat 4 and the upcoming Realizm VPU/VSU.
And no, I'm not referring to SLI, which was specifically designed to pair two Voodoo 2s together. I'm talking about technology that can bridge any two cards together. This is nothing more than the complex bridging involved in say Metabyte's TNT 'SLI' solution that consisted of a PCI bridge and software to split the framebuffers. It was never released for two reasons
1. GeForce 256 released shortly after this was announced.
2. PCI bridge required both the AGP and the PCI card to operate in PCI DMA mode. Unfortunately, there never was such a thing as an "AGP bridge".
In any case, other companies have now successfully implemented a simple framebuffer splitting concept on-card, where the bandwidth is more plentiful. The ATI Rage Fury MAXX and the 3dfx VSA-100 come to mind, these chips simply split the framebuffer rendering according to complexity. Beyond that, NOTHING was shared - triangle and texture data were replicated for each chip.
The key to this: on the software side in 3D mode their software automatically splits two framebuffers between the two cards. As for the "special" chipset, whatever scene data is sent to one video card, the same data is sent to the other video card. I can't imagine it being any more complex than this.
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Imagine 300fps on Far Cry with uber max settings.
VA/MD/DC is the center of the known universe, what Beltway did you think we wereh talking about?
And incidientally, I saw LLY 347 a few minutes later. On the side of the road, surrounded by state troopers. They were arresting him for the shitty carbon fiber hood and spoiler he tried to add to his civic.
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I hope this technology doesn't delay Doom III anymore. John Carmack will probably want to program in full support for his new engine before it ships off cause he has to make money of licenses until he makes the next one.
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"Having 3 slots would be ideal but I won't say no to 2 GFX cards so I can drive two monitors from two independent graphics cards at last."
What's stopping you from plugging an extra PCI based card in today? I've been running two monitors from two independent graphics for years.
Ideally AGP is specced to run at a rate which is as close to the same speed as the northbridge's bus to RAM (close because AGP is a multiple of the PCI bus rate while the FSB on many motherboards is independant of this). Once you've done that, adding another AGP doesn't help because you'd have to share that fast bus into the AGP-mapped memory space. It would have been nice to run 3D games on dual monitors, but by the time that became pratical, 3D cards had dual monitor outputs anyway. So there was no demand to have a dual AGP port board (while not being able to advertise AGP 8x on both, or whatever the fastest at the time was). Increased manufacturing costs without giving any additional benefit to the user.
And workstation/visualization boxes in the hi-end could use PCI-X on the chipsets with like 4 seperate PCI-X buses.
Ultimately no one even bothered to work out how dual AGP might be presented to the operating system.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Graphics algorithms are some of the easiest on earth to distribute and run in parallel. I'm surprised that this hasn't been more popular already.
I supposed they stripped the Graphics part from the VGA when they came up with this?..
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as i recall this isnt really a new conecpt. anyone remeber SLI'd Voodoo's? I was wondering when someone would impliment this tech into video cards again......
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that's still one AGP slot per "motherboard", those systems can have a variable number of motherboards that are tied to a back plane, which is then partitioned.
Although it is impressive that an SSI can run across them. Very neat.
But I wonder if you can actually run a single X11 session using both screens.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There definitely isn't going to be any of that interleaved scanline bullshit of the days of the Voodoo.
Think about it, each card is going to have it's own dual display outputs, as every card that you'll plug into PCI Xpress should have.
Besides, a single graphics card is more than enough to play most games on the market at an acceptable frame rate. ANY PCI-Xpress card will be overkill for almost every game, and fine for the most demanding.
What benefit would you get for having two "working together", when you consider the massive overhead?
So you plug in two, and so you have four monitors. Big deal, Windows already does this.
Maybe this "revolutionary technology" is getting Direct3D to use the whole virtual viewport of all four monitors instead of limiting it to a single card at at time. That'd take some trickery to fool both a generic game engine and the seperate graphic cards w.r.t. viewing frustrums and what's not visible, syncronization of vertex/texel programs, etc.
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That's the location of the PCI-bus-space accessible I/O space of the card (and a place to fall back to if the AGP GART is non-functional).
The AGP card itself is attached in some (chipset specific) way that is very close to the northbridge... it is essentially acting as non-cached physical RAM mapped into the memory space of the system routed through the chipset. The bus protocol (like whatever protocol the chipset has to your RAM) has nothing to do with PCI at all.
BTW, RAM tends to appear as I2C devices on the ISA bus. Does that mean RAM sticks are on the ISA bus?
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Not true. PCI-X and PCI-Express are the same thing. Duh.
No, they are not.
PCI-X = high-speed backwards compatible PCI replacement
PCI-Express = high-speed PCI and AGP replacement and is not backwards compatible with PCI
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Shit-for-brains.
Makes /. look even more illiterate than usual.
:P
I think 1/2 the posts were about multi-head setups, even though the article DIRECTLY STATES that the two cards in this setup are each rendering one half of the screen
serial connections in parallel
When you have parallel serial connections isn't it just one parallel connection?
Not if each connection handles different data.
Let's say you've got 8 wires going in one direction. In a parallel connection, you'd be communicating the 8 different bits of a single byte at the same time. Do it seven more times, and you've sent 8 different bytes.
As multiple connections, you're transmitting the first bit of eight different bytes, then the second bit, then the third. After 8 cycles, you've again sent 8 different bytes, one on each wire.
The downside of the multiple serial conections lies in latency. It doesn't matter if you only want one byte, it'll still take eight cycles to transmit. With a parallel connection, it only takes one cycle.
The downside of a of a parallel connection lies in that you have to keep all eight wires in perfect sync. If you don't, you risk mis-matching bits from different bytes, or even not registering signal on all the wires. With multiple serial connections, Each wire can be independent of the other wires.
That's simplified, of course. With RS232 serial communications, the old standard in PC peripheral technology (though still pretty common in manufacturing technology), you had as few as nine wires. With USB, they've cut it down to four wires.
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You're crippling the card. PCI doesn't cut it for me and you can't always get PCI versions of cards either. Even with PCI Express it's not as interesting as PCI Express 16x, so bear that in ming on future PCs that have PCI Express everywhere, you still want the higher bandwidth PCI Express 16X for graphics.
Thank you so much. I would never have guessed that even with the hint of "MD tag" indicating a Maryland license plate. Perhaps now you could explain the how to find the shift keys so that we can type "the beltway" instead of "THE BELTWAY" as you so eloquently put it.
Oh. Uranus is calling, I think its for you.
that was the point I was trying to make.
The logical hardware layout that the operating system presents to the user is not congruent with the physical hardware layout.
That's just how it APPEARS to the operating system so the OS knows how to talk to and control all the parts. If you want to check the size and health of a piece of RAM, you send commands to an emulated ISA bus that the memory controller presents to you.
If you want to adjust the power settings (you know, like sleep mode or suspend) on an AGP card, you would use the virtual PCI bus location to specify the card you mean and send it standard power commands, even though it's not on a PCI bus at all.
You won't see a hypertransport bus in your sysfs tree even if you have an Opteron, but it doesn't mean it's not what the RAM, AGP, and other CPUs are connected to. It's all handled in the hardware, and you don't know the difference.
Now, I mean there may be this "hypertransport controller" that appears on the PCI bus, but that's just your operating systems window into doing stuff to it. But that doesn't mean the hypertransport links are on the PCI bus. It's actually the other way around.
Here's a good example: attach a USB-based flash drive to your system windows/linux system. SCSI system says it's a SCSI disk attached to a SCSI controller. A virtual SCSI controller. Check the USB bus. USB bus says it has a mass storage device. Huh! Well which is it? (Actually the SCSI subsystem would probably call the controller something like USB mass storage host controller or something)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
i am a part of 2 teams that are still writing drivers for 3dfx so please dont give up on them just yet. the newest drivers support up to 8.0 and beta for 9.0. they also allows emulated T&L for playing some of the latest games at a decent FPS and some nice DVD movies with all the special effects. for instance, on my 3dfx Voodoo 3 i can play warcraft 3, UT 2003 and UT 2004, Need FOr speed HP2 and Underground(and of course the older NFS titles) and many more games! you can go to http://www.3dfx.com and click on the voodoo files link to get the updates and/or drivers for the current 3dfx card that you have or would like to buy. Unfortunately i think all the new drivers are compatible with WIN9x, 2k and XP..sorry linux 3dfx fans. anyway the cards are still alive so if you would like to help with GLide drivers or openGL drivers for the cards then please snoop around and ask how you can help. :) oh yes and to respond to one person, a lot of 3dfx fans did stay with NVidia b/c most of the 3dfx engineers went to NV. so youve got a lot of die-hard NV/ex-3dfx fans out there... including me :)
Personally I am looking forward to running my own beowulf cluster made up of 8 Radeon X800 XT XT Super Duper XXX TT Platinum Card, with 64 pixels pipelines each, effectivelly making a 512 node supercomputer. All of this inside my desktop tower.
Wow, so many things wrong with that statment.
1) You COULD do this same thing with AGP what they are talking about here is using the 2 cards to process data for 1 display (not for dual head). You COULD do this an AGP because in most cases you would send the SAME data to both cards and since AGP is a multi-drop bus all the cards could listen to the same data, the bus won't take that much of a hit. The only bottle neck would be in returning data from card 2 to card 1 for display, but it wouldn't be that bad because all the processing has already be done, so that data's going to be small
2)AGP didn't do this not becasue of the cost to MOBO makers but because it would require a lot of software and hardware support on AGP (a multi-drop bus).
3) This article isn't about a chipset with 2 PCI-Express (NOT to be confused with PCI-X) ports, it's about a motherboard with them. The board pobabaly uses a PCI-Express switch to get the second port (so they are going to share the bandwidth).
4) How dual AGP would present to the OS is easy. The hard part is how the two cards talk to each other, and I suspect that this will still be an issue for alienware.
ultimately EVERY device interaction in the system appears to be a memory access to the driver writer. But in order to support various modes of being to attach arbitrary devices and support unknown features, we adhere to some protocols standardized some time ago. Whether or not these protocols are conveyed over the same type of physical hardware that they originally did when it was introduced is up in the air.
The driver doesn't communicate through the PCI bus at all. Rather:
1) USB-mass storage takes the SCSI commands from the disk subsystem
2) mass storage converts them (trivially) into packets for injection into the USB bus.
3) mass storage informs the host controller subsystem to transfer data.
4) host controller talks using directly to the USB chipset through memory-mapped I/O (how it actually "gets" there, it doesn't care) and lets it know it's about to do DMA
5) host controller schedules DMA transfer with system (ultimately also using memory mapped I/O or maybe OOB I/O)
How the data actually gets moved from memory into the USB chipset is completely up to the motherboard manufacturer. Most likely the USB chipset is hooked up via a real PCI bus. And when you configure the devices, the system would be talking to a real PCI bridge when getting all the address ranges to do that I/O.
But that's not necessarily true. The USB host controller could just as easily be a directly attached member of the northbridge with no physical PCI bus presence at all. It'd still work, provided that the host controller was properly initialized and had the same register map.
It's a software issue, but so's all of it. It looks like that for simplicities sake, and for making the drivers more portable.
The USB hardware likes to talk in a dialect of SCSI, so you make it look like a SCSI device, naturally.
There'd be no reason to attempt to bit-bang the memory-mapped registers of the USB host controller, even though you could.
They're expecting you to layer your drivers and interfaces in that fashion, and the hardware has provisions to help make the end-result (the state of your flash disk) match up with what the software expects.
How the illusion is completed can be all software, all hardware, or a combination of both!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
From the article:
The current implementation splits the screen in half, assigning rendering for each half to one of two cards using a software load balancer to try and ensure proper synchronization. (You may recall that 3dfx's SLI technology split the workload by alternating lines. This is a slightly different approach.) The motherboard is being produced for Alienware by iWill, and Alienware is currently saying that they expect users to see a ~50% performance boost over single card implementations.
50% better from an extra card is nothing to sneeze at. And that sounds reasonable from the point of view of all the extra overhead you'd be going through to coordinate getting the top and bottom halves up at the same time. It's still boggling to me that anyone would shell out so much for a new system in order to game (my PS2 does relatively well, thank you, and even my old StarMax with Voodoo 3 plays Team Fortress quite well in 2004), but as far as geeky-cool, this is awfully neat zeroes and ones.
That said, your original point is right on the money -- sorry can't mod right now. You definitely should be able to see a number of artifacts comparing the top of your screen to the bottom, which could be comical in effect, depending. (Hey, let's see what my Rave looks like up next to this X800 XT...)
That said, however, I'm sure the idea is to have two of the same, but to have the demo create Frankenstein's monster if only to show it can be done. Certainly if two different cards work, two of the same should look proverbially beautious.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
1) See my other comment in this article about why I think routing data from one card back to the other is silly, and it is a huge bottleneck.
Also, they talk about using different cards. Last time I checked, an ATI card wouldn't work with an NVidia driver. Not likely. No, they'd have to be seperate address spaces for it to work in any sane fashion.
I can imagine if they were the SAME card the driver would create some overlapping maps for a special "joined" render mode. It have to be more at hoping there's a large correlation in the data both cards need pre-render, but you're not going to have perfect scaling.
2) Well, okay. But I was not assuming it'd be as simple as multidrop, that'd be kind of retarded. Ultimately it's whether or not the consumer has a way to take adventage of it...
3) I was explaining what was available in the past which filled the role that dual AGP might have... multiple expensive PCI-X cards in server mobo/chipsets. They did exist, they still exist. You can put 4 XVR-1200s in a Sun v880z if you want... gives you 8 1920x1200 3d-accelerated displays. There was an existing solution, so no market pressure existed.
4) No, it's not. Direct3d would have to do some heavy lifting to reinterpret what the games' graphic engine wants to display to what each card needs to know. A lot of it would be shared, but there'd be a need to modifying vertex programs, adjusting vertex/transformation data, syncronizing retrace, etc.
The easy solution would to be to add a feature to a card that lets it pretend the viewport is XY, then only render the subset XZ. Each card gets all the data required for XY, but knows which subset it's supposed to render independantly. But I don't think any chipsets out there support that yet. So it'd have to be added. Hence, dual AGP would not be useful for existing hardware. And again, it'd only work for matched cards.
But that's AGP, anyway. We're talking about PCI-express. And they are not multidrop. So clearly an extension to Direct3D is needed. I think that's what Alienware is going to do. Define the interface. Pressure Microsoft into updating DirectX to support it and create a software emulation layer to present the right data to each display. Then hope the driver authors can implement the subset rendering feature.
They'll solve combining multiple cards' output into one monitor by selling an Alienware monitor with two inputs that displays seamlessly side by side... taking a cue from Liebermann
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Is how massive Alienware's markup on this technology will be? I'm sure that constructive modders, or mobo manufacturers will have this out to the general public (read people who don't want to pay 5k for a pretty case) as soon as it ships.
Now, I can see how this would speed things up mightily, but...they keep mentioning that the two cards don't even have to be from the same manufacturer. Won't this cause an obvious quality difference between the two halves of the screen? Or is something going to force the better card to render like the worse one so they match?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Nothing. AGP video cards are still running ahead in the video card preformance race. Which goes to make you think... two PCI video cards would be simply awesome, but what about two AGP video cards? How much better would two less powerful PCIs be than one powerful AGP? Just something to think about while reading this...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Considering the beltway is at the fucking capital of the only superpower in the world, and we have yet to contact any alien civilizations, yes it is the center of the known universe.
Actually it was a direct copy paste from a google search (cause honestly I didn't know what the beltway was either :)/ belt way.htm
http://www.c-span.org/guide/congress/glossary
Alienware just found out that PCI-Express can be used by gamers, so it is going to carry re-branded PCI-Express boards, and an analog monitor splitter.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Please look up "irregardless" in the dictionary, or on dictionary.com, and then paste the definition into a reply. I always forget what this word really means...
The current implementation splits the screen in half, assigning rendering for each half to one of two cards using a software load balancer to try and ensure proper synchronization.
Ewww.
You definitely should be able to see a number of artifacts comparing the top of your screen to the bottom
You'll be able to see artifacts even with two identical cards. There will be a disconnect between the two, since things like antialiasing, ansiotropic filtering, pixel and vertex shaders, and virtually every other modern feature bases "what does this pixel look like" on what adjacent pixels look like.
It'll get really ugly for some effects too -- waves could abruptly terminate and start, fog and smoke could have different outlines, etc.
It's still boggling to me that anyone would shell out so much for a new system in order to game (my PS2 does relatively well, thank you, and even my old StarMax with Voodoo 3 plays Team Fortress quite well in 2004)
I'm not touting Alienware, but please don't compare apples and oranges. The PS2 runs virtually all games at a wonderful resolution of ~640x240 @60fps. There are a handful of games that it can do 640x480 @60fps with (requires component video cables and an HDTV). And even then it's rendering stuff that can be easily handled by a GeForce. TeamFortress is ancient... it doesn't have anything close to the graphical goodies in the upcoming games.
If you have the time, download the 700MB HL2 trailer from this year's E3 (it's 25 minutes long). We're rapidly closing in on photorealism.
I'm not touting Alienware, but please don't compare apples and oranges.
I'm just saying that I can easily get my fill playing my PS2 -- and that about the only thing missing there is online fps gaming at a level I enjoy, which I easily fill by playing Team Fortress and Action Quake online. You might say that makes me not much of a gamer, but I do play a decent amount, all things considered. Why I'd need to shell out for hardware newer than my 1 GHz iMac or 2 GHz P4 Gateway laptop, I'm not real sure. I can afford to skip Doom 3 for the time being if I have to (and I bet I don't, if I put the rendering quality low enough).
So as a relatively hard-core gamer myself, I'm just not sure how Alienware creates such an audience. If I had $3k to burn, it sure as heck wouldn't be on a souped up gaming box, that's all. I'm happy we're "closing in on photorealism", but don't need to spend Alienware dollars to get there. It'll come to me soon enough at a price I can afford. Until then, the Metal Gear Solids and Madden 2005's will keep me entertained.
That said, as a technical advancement (and as a programmer myself), the dual card set-up is a pretty neat trick with the 0s and 1s! Just don't expect my credit card to vote for the advance.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.