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

In other news...

[Unloaded]

...Microsoft announced that Clippy had broken the before unheard of 2,000 fps barrier.

Re:In other news...

[david.given]

Microsoft announced that Clippy had broken the before unheard of 2,000 fps barrier.

However, they went on to say that Clippy was still intact. They're going to try again using a bigger catapult and with a concrete-reinforced barrier.

Quad-screen?

[Vrallis]

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.

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.

Press Release

[Anonymous Coward]

over here: clicky

Voodoo

[Eu4ria]

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.

Re:Voodoo

[kamelkev]

Voodoo was basically the beginning of the performance PC market, with tons of wierd options and card types.

Benchmarks for the old 3dfx V2 SLI can be seen here:

http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic/19980204/

I was (and still am, although its in the junk pile) a 3dfx V2 owner, the performance of that card was just amazing at the time. The Voodoo and the Voodoo2 definitely changed the world of 3d gaming.

Also of interest is an API that came out much later for the 3dfx chipsets that actually let you use your 3dfx chipset (they didn't call it a GPU back in the day) as another system processor. If you were an efficient coder you could actually offload geometric and linear calculations to the card for things other than rendering. I can't seem to find the link for that though, it may be gone forever.

interesting technology

[cheese_wallet]

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.

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)

Are we going to need this...

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

for Longhorn?

Re:Man am I out of the loop.

[Auntie Virus]

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

Re:Man am I out of the loop.

[The_K4]

Since the PCI-Express spec defines switches (these are like P2P-bridges only they have 2 sub-buses) a mother board manufacturer could add 2 of 3 of these and get 4 PCI-Express Graphics ports (or 7 and get 8 ports) the problem is that every time you do this you have to share the total bandwidth at the highest level. Since PCI-Express does have more bandwidth the AGP 8x and 1/2 of that bandwidth is dedicated up the other 1/2 dedicated down. So the down-stream (where video cards use most of their bandwidth) is greater the AGP8x's TOTAL bandwidth. So this data path bottle next shouldn't be bad if you have 2 cards (might work well for 4 if they use the bus right).