Slashdot Mirror
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."
I had this back with my Voodoo2! Man... boy was I the awesome dude back then =)
-Imidazole2
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...
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );