Matrox permits the combining of their dual display cards into what appears to the OS to be a virtual wide display. Under XP/W2K you get what appears to be one very wide display instead of two distinct monitors.
If other card makers support this option, and to be honest I haven't checked to see if my ATI cards can do it, then it's possible the vid card driver could present the abstracted single display to the software layer that Alienware is building, such that you do get a wide diplay for gaming on multiple monitors.
Hey, maybe it'll make Parhelia usable as a gaming card.:-)
Tumwater, far as I knew, was only to have a x16 and a x8 PCIe slot off the MCH. Apparently, this is incorrect and it has twin x16 PCIe slot support. While Tumwater is targetted for Xeon workstations, there's nothting that I'm aware of which would block its usage in a P4 system. The P4 and Xeon CPU bus protocols are the same.
The extra that Alienware is adding is their software layer which allows processing of video data by two separate video cards. Metabyte (I think they were formerly Wicked3D), which Erwos mentioned elsehwere in this discussion, had this sort of technology up and running, but far as I know it never shipped.
This isn't just multiple display card support, this is also a software layer allowing load-balancing such that the two work together to render a whole screen. It's entirely possible this could end up being multiple-display-capable if the underlying drivers for each card allow combining of displays, similar to the way Matrox allows their multi-monitor cards (G4xx, G550, P-series, Parhelia) to be presented to the OS as "one" display.
Hopefully other companies will provide something similar. I'd rather have an ATI-only setup that is compatible with any dual x16 PCIe-supporting Tumwater board than be forced to buy Alienware's ugly case.:-)
The Gainax DVDs are available from Gainax and CD-Japan. The original DVDs have been available for a while. Gainax has released them again in box sets named Second Impact. There are three Second Impact boxes, two of which are now available (third's out in May). There are no subtitles or english-language dialog on the Gainax discs.
I own all of the released ADV and Second Impact boxes. After the second DVD, the Gainax and ADV DVDs are the same, picture-quality-wise.
From what I understand, the reason the ADV DVDs were low quality was that the ADV DVDs were made from the tape masters, while the Gainax DVDs were made from the original cells. Both exhibit jitter to a certain degree, so I don't know how accurate this information is.
It looks like a rebadged Shinco 868 player. There was an annoucement that it plays games in July, but they seem to have removed that information from the product information page.
Lik-Sang has had them in stock for months, and still lists them as Megadrive compatible.
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Matrox permits the combining of their dual display cards into what appears to the OS to be a virtual wide display. Under XP/W2K you get what appears to be one very wide display instead of two distinct monitors.
If other card makers support this option, and to be honest I haven't checked to see if my ATI cards can do it, then it's possible the vid card driver could present the abstracted single display to the software layer that Alienware is building, such that you do get a wide diplay for gaming on multiple monitors.
Hey, maybe it'll make Parhelia usable as a gaming card. :-)
Tumwater, far as I knew, was only to have a x16 and a x8 PCIe slot off the MCH. Apparently, this is incorrect and it has twin x16 PCIe slot support. While Tumwater is targetted for Xeon workstations, there's nothting that I'm aware of which would block its usage in a P4 system. The P4 and Xeon CPU bus protocols are the same.
The extra that Alienware is adding is their software layer which allows processing of video data by two separate video cards. Metabyte (I think they were formerly Wicked3D), which Erwos mentioned elsehwere in this discussion, had this sort of technology up and running, but far as I know it never shipped.
This isn't just multiple display card support, this is also a software layer allowing load-balancing such that the two work together to render a whole screen. It's entirely possible this could end up being multiple-display-capable if the underlying drivers for each card allow combining of displays, similar to the way Matrox allows their multi-monitor cards (G4xx, G550, P-series, Parhelia) to be presented to the OS as "one" display.
Hopefully other companies will provide something similar. I'd rather have an ATI-only setup that is compatible with any dual x16 PCIe-supporting Tumwater board than be forced to buy Alienware's ugly case. :-)
The Gainax DVDs are available from Gainax and CD-Japan. The original DVDs have been available for a while. Gainax has released them again in box sets named Second Impact. There are three Second Impact boxes, two of which are now available (third's out in May). There are no subtitles or english-language dialog on the Gainax discs. I own all of the released ADV and Second Impact boxes. After the second DVD, the Gainax and ADV DVDs are the same, picture-quality-wise. From what I understand, the reason the ADV DVDs were low quality was that the ADV DVDs were made from the tape masters, while the Gainax DVDs were made from the original cells. Both exhibit jitter to a certain degree, so I don't know how accurate this information is.
It looks like a rebadged Shinco 868 player. There was an annoucement that it plays games in July, but they seem to have removed that information from the product information page.
Lik-Sang has had them in stock for months, and still lists them as Megadrive compatible.