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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.
agp killed it.
plus that it really makes more sense have the power in one card anyways if you're getting it, so the market for these is a niche one.
cool software anyways, kudos to them and yadda yadda.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I think that's supposed to be "if one line takes longer than the other" as in rendering time and not length of the line.
Although I hold Alienware in high regard for making really fast gaming computers (that are arguably worth the premium price if you can't be bothered to build your own), I lose substantial respect for them when they allow their cool new technology to be represented by a marketing turd who couldn't be bothered to understand the history of what his company has done or what he's talking about. Buy a clue if you care to succeed. I want to like Alienware... I really do. TTFN.
Try and actually order a system from them and you'll lose all respect, and stop wanting to like them and instead hate them.
Worst company I have ever dealt with in any market, computers or otherwise. I pray they blow all their cash on this technology (doomed to fail, IMHO) and send themselves to their grave.
I didn't read the article, but from what I understand the technology is somewhat more generic than the Voodoo SLI. If that's the case, then, eventually, as the technology matures, you'd be able to upgrade your two video cards to get better performance. Sure, the next generation of cards may be faster than two of today's cards. But two of the next generation's cards will be twice as fast as one. And eventually, maybe you'll be able to add as many video cards as you want, in order to make your system faster and faster. Video rendering is an inherently parallelizable problem, and if this was a generic parallelizer, it'd be worth the money.
I did some devlopment for similar sytem - 4 videocard working in parallel, tiling the screen or time-dividing frames. To put it short - it's very difficalt to extract performance gain, require a lot of geometrical culling or synchronizations and other triks. Off the shelf game will not give 50% performance gain with such a system, 15% in the best case (and i doubt even that, and it would quite probably create artefacts) . To extract something similar to 50% would require a lot off efforts for developers, no develpers would want to do it to support a tiny market share.
I'm going to have to agree with this... If you want the latest technology and awesome things you should go with Alienware, but you better be prepared to pay for it... as it doesn't come cheap. But with some of today's really good systems, you can get really good FPS on almost any game, for significantly less money than an Alienware. Which causes one to wonder... how much is too much...