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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.
Doom 3: $60
...Priceless?
Dr. Pepper and Potato Chips: $5
Alienware Super Extreme Gaming System: $10,000
Having the "Sorry, I'm broke" Excuse to Avoid Going out on Weekends and Playing Computer Games Instead:
There are some things students can't afford. For everyone else, there's Alienware.
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
Didn't this only last about 1/2 of a "generation" the last two times it was attempted?
"Two?" you say?
Yes, the obvious one is the old Voodoo 1 & 2 cards, but I distictly remember at least one (I think 2 or 3) company(ies) making cards that used 3 S3 chips (one processing each color) for a performance boost.
They were all "really hot" (popularity, not thermally... well, ok both) for a very short period of time, since the next full generation of chips completely blew them away.
It was silly then, it's silly now.
Now what _I_ want, is a triple-headed system that you can play FPS games on with a front and two side views (peripheral vision, or at least just a wider landscape in 2 or 3 monitors). The hardware is there (well, for dual at least), but do any games support this?
It _can't_ be that off-the-wall, after all, the SPARC version of Doom supported triple-heads way back in version 1.2! (they dropped it after that)
OK, that wasn't *exactly* the same thing... that required a different box for each of the left and right displays, but they acted as a slave so you only operated the center system... it was _extremely_ cool!
Hmmm... I wonder how long it'll be before 16:9 displays are common, the only one I know of is the sweet monster made by apple that costs as much as a used car!
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
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.
PCI super duper eXtra Special.
What the hell is up with this Brian Joyce guy?!?
Of course any "hardcore gamer" knows about the history of their "patents pending technology" as their Director of Marketing calls it. Too bad he doesn't.
In the article, this guy says: "SLI stood for Scan Line interface where each card drew every other line of the frame and my understanding was that the major challenge was to keep the image in sync. If one line's longer than another, then tearing, artifacts, and keeping the two cards in sync was a real issue. The benefits of doing it half and half is we can take advantage of the load balancing and the synchronization challenge can be overcome."
Alright... I'm sure the technology they've developed over there is some hot fscking shit. I'm sure they have a top R&D team that knows what they're doing && this custom motherboard + pre-driver thing is a good idea. Once developed fully, it could let you keep adding as many video cards as your case can hold, even potentially from different manufacturers, to improve total rendering capacity. That is great. Alienware has some very talented people to solve all the associated problems with accomplishing this. I respect their achievement.
That said, what the hell do they have a Director of Marketing for who doesn't know what he's talking about? He gets the SLI acronym wrong. How the fsck could one scan line be longer than the other resulting in tearing or cards getting out-of-sync? Come on! I know he's not a technical guy but then he should just stick to his hype buzzwords && patents && shit like that because he totally ruins Alienware's credibility when he shows no understanding of the most prominent attempt at this type of endeavor in the past. At least he said "my understanding" in there but he should've said "I don't know or understand the history so I'll just talk about what I do know."
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.
-Pip
Oh, yeah, right. They are.
I mean, come on, with the kinda influence they have - they asked ATI and nVida for custom cards for the Area51m - is it any real suprise they are attempting to make themselves even better?
I suppose that the fact there are a number of other producers in this Niche - See the earlier slashdot story - might encourage the development. But the simple fact remains - They are on top, and if they can lock down this intelectual property till 2nd gen, then they can release it publically and become innovators in more than just overclocking and cool case mods.
MMMmmmm...Cool case mods.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these... *ducks*
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.
This kind of system has been around for quite some time, both the software and hardware to do it. SGI's Onyx4 uses their OpenGL Multipipe software kit (which works on unmodified OpenGL apps), a bunch of ATI FireGL cards, and some digital video compositing hardware to do both loadbalancing for complex data sets (what Alienware is doing) and realtime rendering at resolutions much higher than any one card could support (tiling).
The thing that's new about this implementation is that you won't have to run out and drop $40,000 on the base Onyx4 if you have an application that needs this (to some extent - SGI's solution will go to 16 cards, with the bandwidth to drive them all, while Alienware's is currently limited to 2). Only $4000 for the Alienware box.
Somehow I doubt that Alienware will get the patents that are 'pending' - I'd imagine that SGI probably already has a whole portfolio covering this area, since this kind of thing is their bread and butter. It's nice, though, to see a consumer-affordable implementation of this technology coming to market.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Anybody see the demo videos of this? If you did, you'd notice that when they're busy unplugging alternating video cables to show that only the top or bottom half of the screen is rendered, the size of the image never changes.
In other words, in their examples, which used quake 3, there was NO load balancing going on. If there was, when we saw, for example, the top half of the screen, the size of the top half should have been constantly changing.
I understand fully that we were seeing alpha or beta level stuff here, but perhaps they should have waited until they had a fully functional model before showing it off.
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.
Am I the only person who couln't give a damn about SLI and would rather have two dual-head cards in the system to power 4 flatpanels all with scrolling ccze'd logs so I can sit back in my huge leather chair and cackle with power while stroking my white cat?