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Alienware Discuss New Video Array Technology For Gamers
Gaming Nexus writes "Over at Gaming Nexus, we've posted an interview with Alienware about their new video array technology, which 'will provide gamers with an expected 50% increase in gaming performance by utilizing two video cards.' The interview covers the creation of the technology, the problems they had in developing it, as well some more details on how it works." The short version is that it utilizes multiple cards to render one screen, similar to SLI, but with many more features added in as well. What Alienware has developed is a software layer that sits between the video drivers and the application, routing things to where they need to be.
RTFA!
GamingNexus: Was this something that you couldn't do with AGP or had you considered doing something with AGP?
Brian Joyce: We actually had a working prototype with AGP. But as soon as it became clear that PCI Express was going to become the industry standard, we had to start re-working it for PCI Express.
man
No manual entry for
PCI-X being the server standard.
No, not that it really matters. And yes, I'm being overly anal.
--LordPixie
There is a three head video card right now, it's called matrox parhelia, and it's overpriced and underpowered like everything else matrox has ever made. Still, the visual quality is supposed to be quite good and if you don't pump the resolution too high (I wouldn't use more than about 800x600 per display tops) you should be able to get good performance out of most games. Games which support arbitrary resolutions are supposed to support it automatically (as they do with nvidia twin displays) and some games support it directly, like toca 2 and a number of flight sims.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Matrox Parhelia was advertised to use 150 degrees of vision in games, utilizing 3 monitors.
Go here and check out the TripleHead Desktop table.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Custom made motherboards with two PCI Express slots. Saw the actual board on TechTV a few weeks ago.
Still not sure whether they've patented it or not - hopefully not so we'll be able to but these mobo's from other vendors and build these rigs ourself without paying alienware an extra $1500 for unnecessary services.
In reality SLI stands for Scan Line Interleave.
RTFA: Multiple patents pending on the technology. Likely not on the concept of having multiple PCI Express x16 slots, just on the software and compositing/sync hardware.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
"Video rendering is an inherently parallelizable problem..."
Um, no... not at all.
Think about how much bandwidth is needed just for the CPU of the system to feed the graphics hardware that is doing all the work (AGP 1x, 2x, 4x, now 8x and the new PCIx, etc.).
Rendering on two boards means _4x_ the traffic over the bus!
Don't believe me? Think about it.. your CPU has to feed card A _and_ card B (2x so far).
Then, since you're only displaying on ONE of them, card B has to xfer the rendered display back over the bus to the CPU, then the CPU has to send it back out to card A. Even if card B could directly talk to card A (maybe, my Bt878 card does), that's still 3x the traffic over the bus!
Maybe this is why they claim only a 50% improvement in performance by doubling the hardware.
Doesn't sound very "parallelizable" to me.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -