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."

Comments

Press Release

[Anonymous Coward]

over here: clicky

Re:Voodoo

[scum-e-bag]

The company was 3dFx, and it was thier Voodoo II cards that allowed the use of two cards a few years back, sometime around 1998 IIRC.

Re:Man am I out of the loop.

[Laebshade]

PCI-Express is meant to replace AGP. From what little I've read into it, it will require lower voltages than AGP and has a wider bus.

this isn't new

[f13nd]

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)

Re:this isn't new

[BenBenBen]

The AGP port spec lays it out; AGP is a preferred slot on the PCI bus, with four main enhancements (pipeline depth etc) designed to... Accelerate Graphics. Therefore, if you had more than one PCI bus, you could technically have more than one AGP port. However, I cannot find a single motherboard that offers 2 AGP slots, including looking in numerous AV/editing specialists, where I'd expect this osrt of thing to tip up.

Re:Voodoo

[UnderScan]

SLI - scan line interleve, was available for 3dfx Voodoo IIs (maybe even Voodoo 1) where the first card would process all the odd lines & the second card would process all the even lines.

Re:Man am I out of the loop.

[Randolpho]

After I posted that, I did a quick google:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,94724,00 .asp

Re:Quad-screen?

[houghi]

I want tri-head or quad-head video, but with at least AGP speeds

So order one now. They are available here at Matrox.

Re:Man am I out of the loop.

[Plutor]

You've been out of the PC market for about a decade then, if you've never heard of PCI-Express. It's been proposed and talked about and raved about for years, but it's just now finally coming to market. The best thing is that it's not limited to a single slot per board! That's why this parallel thing is even possible.

Nice, A complete Vapor-article.

[Gr8Apes]

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.

Re:Nice, A complete Vapor-article.

[Caesar]

E3 is on this week. E3 is dominated by product announcements, including products that won't see the light of day for years. So, the "vapor" aspect of it is what pretty much what happens at most of the trade shows. By that measure, half of the news out this week is "vapor." Sure, some people might blow smoke and tell you about the performance stats, but we all know that when the products actually ship, their "performance stats" will probably have changed as well.

So, you have the press release to go on. And as you noted, I threw up a flag of caution. I didn't call "vapor" on it, however, because as I noted, they are saying Q3 and Q4 for VA and X2, which seems awfully soon to be pimping vapor. I also happen to know that this is in fact happening, so I didn't feel obliged to cast aspersions on it.

From the PR, it's rather clear to me that this is a single-monitor solution. It's also likely the case that this is not just a PCI-Express matter. Call me old fashioned, but Alienware says that they have patent-pending technology, and while I would usually take the language for marketing drivel, I have no reason not to trust Alienware on this matter. In fact, they have tried this before, but the underlying technology just wasn't doable.

Intel's Chipset only supports One x16 PCIe

[hattig]

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?

Re:Intel's Chipset only supports One x16 PCIe

[Short Circuit]

Anyone with that hardware could tell us.

Under Linux, run "lspci" as root, and see if the two cards are on different PCI buses.

You can do something similar under Windows XP:

Go to the device manager, and look at the Location field of your two video devices. The box I'm on only has one, but here's what an AGP card's location field looks like: "PCI bus 1, device 0, function 0"

Everything old is new again?

[Fortunato_NC]

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.

Re:Man am I out of the loop.

[Auntie Virus]

There's a White Paper on PCI Express from Dell: Here

Metabyte PGC

[Erwos]

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?).

-Erwos

Re:Next comes dual AGP graphics.

[DaHat]

Nay, the AGP standard is built around a single slot and a single graphics card. To permit two AGP cards running natively (via the AGP bus) in a single system would be quite difficult if not impossible, far easier to look to the future and a new technology to make it work better then any sort of hack job that could be done today.

3dfx has done it again ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

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.

The Return of Voodoo 2 SLI

[MoZ-RedShirt]

History repeating: Who can (or can't) remember

Re:How is this different than what I've been doing

[IAmAMacOSXAddict]

If you read the short article. they are talking about pushing all the data for a SINGLE monitor, through two PARALELL cards. Essentially allowing for twice the GPU power to crunch the graphics for the monitor.

You are running a bunch of video cards INDEPENDANT of each other. Clearly NOT THE SAME THING...

Re:Next comes dual AGP graphics.

[Jeremy Erwin]

It's in the AGP 3.0 spec.

AGP3.0 allows a core-logic implementation to provide multiple AGP3.0 Ports. Each AGP3.0 Port is a bridge device with multiple AGP3.0 devices hanging off the secondary bus. Each Port has a separate Graphics AGP aperture and GART that is independent and not shared with another AGP3.0 Port; however, these are shared across the devices within a single AGP3.0 Port.

Not really hard....

[Kjella]

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

Re:Quad-screen?

[Lumpy]

hows it feel to want? espicalyl about something that has been available for a decade now.

here

Matrox, because all the other cards are merely toys for the kids at home.

ATI will be doing this it's Catalyst drivers soon

[89cents]

Ok, so they havn't explicitly said so, but have been hinting at it

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.

Re:Hello? Matrox, anyone?

[Niddix]

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.

Re:Light on Info

[Caesar]

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1084398037.html

It splits the screen in half. Alienware claims a ~50% boost.

Re:Man am I out of the loop.

[WuphonsReach]

You've been out of the PC market for about a decade then, if you've never heard of PCI-Express.

That's rather over-stating the case.

Roughly 10 years ago, PCI was finally just supplanting EISA/VESA and ISA boards were still common.

I build a few machines per year, and PCI-Express only just hit my radar screen in the past 12-18 months. Even today, I have yet to see mainstream motherboards or cards for it, so it's still rather ephemeral at this point.

It is an interesting design. Whether or not it will live up to it's promise remains to be seen.

Re:3dfx Still Alive! Drivers Still Being Written

[Cutting_Crew]

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 :)