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Triple Headed Desktop Display for Fast 3D Apps?

Posted by Cliff on from the thee-heads-are-better-than-two dept.

Once Was SGI Customer asks: "My group was once a big SGI user. We run a Powerwall display center with 3 large screens, currently driven by an SGI Onyx Infinite Reality (IR) to provide a single desktop with 3D acceleration across all screens. The Onyx is now old and very slow compared to our Nvidia cards, that do a great job at TwinView display, but not 'TripleView'. I'd like to know if there are any PC manufacturers who make a card that can do what the IR can do (in terms of a single desktop across 3D displays with fast 3D acceleration), but for Windows and Red Hat (now Fedora Core) Linux?"

4 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re: by kerbawya · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/qid/home.cfm am i wrong or does this satisfy what you are looking for...

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  2. Widescreen monitors by DavidYaw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Two widescreen monitors would provide the same amount of screen real estate as three normal monitors.

  3. Haw about DMX? by hawkstone · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't know how well the multi-GPU support works with NVIDIA cards under Linux -- I can only testify that dual monitors from a single card works flawlessly. Others in this thread have indicated it should work well if you can get a new motherboard with dual PCI-E and slap a couple 6800s in it, but I haven't seen it in person.

    What I do know is that you can go to a multi-node system and run DMX (Distributed Multiheaded X11), which was designed to run powerwall displays. You're in the unfortunate position of having a three-headed wall, as going to a multi box system feels like overkill for you. That said, three PCs with a gig-E interconnect is going to cost far less than one Onyx IR pipe, DMX scales well, and we've got much larger walls than that (I forget the number -- maybe 2x4) running beautifully on a cluster. It's stood up to demos to VIPs without crashing, and I believe that's the most failure-inducing state for any setup.

    By the way, DMX is transparent to your application -- it looks just like a single X server with a single OpenGL context. Thus, it can be used with any existing OpenGL apps.

  4. What about Chromium? by Skinkie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://chromium.sourceforge.net/

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