Graphics Breakthrough in Video Cards

The future of video cards and dual processing showcased at the E3. I can't even begin to imagine the possibilities the presents.

http://gear.ign.com/articles/515/515363p1.html

Wow

 

i read about this a day or so ago it sure whould be cool to have seen it though. It also say two processor Mobo.. maybe dual 3.2P4?? even if not this should rise Alienware's prices to an all time high..
/me thinks up a price for a dual 3.2 system with dual R423XT's then inflates the price to make Alienware happy.. total price 300Billion USD.

<thinks> they made it so one card does the top and one does the bottom of the screen.. whouldn't it have been better to have done left and right becouse the top is normaly just sky and that must take less time to render.. unless they did it like that just to make it so that you could run a 9600XT top and a R423XT bottom to save some money and still have the huge performance leep</thinks>

 

youll have to run 2 identical cards at the same speed like back in the voodoo days, or the faster one will just slow down to the slower one. Itll be interesting if they can get the software to actually pull this off, with drivers and game engines and directX etc

Just like the old voodoos?: One does one frame, one does the other?

 

i thought that they each did alternating lines of each frame?
hence the name SLI

 

Of course if you choose to do this with a Geforce 6800 Ultra you'll need 4 free power cables and 960 watts of PSU power

 

I read an article on gamespot saying it will come with Dual Xeons, up to 8GB of DDR2 and a 800W PSU!

Apparently the way the graphics sharing works is one card does the top half of the screen and other the bottom half. Supports PCI Express cards so it can be either Nvidia or ATI.

It also comes with a factory tour plus you get a personal sales man and tech support person so it definetly wont be cheap.

 

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/05/13/news_6098040.html

Up to 50% faster than current cards supposdly....
So that'd be oo ~20.5k 03 marks STOCK then

 

And only £3,500 or so for the pc

It's getting silly, guys!

 

Well consider other brands such as Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bang&Olufsen, Dualit, Smeg, Harrods, etc... There is a market for premium products and while they may be silly some amazing things are produced by them!

 

Sorry, the voodoos did lines, but id expect more modern video cards todo frames cause a) it would be easier to implment with drivers and b) the cards are designed to render a whole frame and optimisations are based on that.

 

They were talking about this over at [H] and it should most likely be able t be implemented by other companies without licenesing out the technology from alienware. I had a hunch we would see something like this happen when I heard of BTX and the whole PCI-E deal.

 

sounds like a fantastic oppotunity. If this happens for everyone, not just alienware buyers then im definately gonna consider it.
I was almost right about the alternate scene thing. Hopefully theyll optimise this "video merger hub", also id like to know how 2 outputs from the vgas are combined into one? hopefully we'll see dvi and vga.

edit: read the damn article bindi

The merger hub is a pci-e based card that uses analouge in and out i hope they do dvi for my TFT.

edit:

roffle! 1kW power for your pc! jeeeezeus-h that's some powerful meatballs.

this thing must cost at least $10k

 

I believe Sapphire were working on placing two cores on one board with the 9800. I wonder if they are continuing this work with the R420 line of graphics processors?

Now that would be something dual dual core R420 boards The performance would be nothing short of mind blowing.

 

They'd need some stupid sized board or some stupid sized quantity of layers to fit all the traces on it though, not to mention custom (read expensive) chips to integrate them all together. I remember seeing a picture of dual 9600 cores iirc, but it was a non working sample.

 

it's taken 3 years to develop

 

The Radeons are actually designed to work in conjunction with up to 256 chips so it would be purely driver development. Yes the boards and the number of layers would be quite high increasing cost, but considering the cost of this anway it is a bit academic That was dual 9800 cores by the way.

 

I dont think so much, it had small gpu coolers on them. Mind you, so does the herc 9800p. Surely it would need bigger coolers cause 2 cores = hotter card.

 

The card will generate more heat, but I'd imagine as a whole rather than for individual GPUs. Those fans do not look particularly small anyway as the card is rather large

 

Would't this dual-video card solution just double the theoretical fillrate? Everything else (shaders and what not) would have to be calculated twice, right?

Or... is this just like making half the workload on each card (ie each card would only do 30 frames a second)? I can see how that might be helpful... maybe...

1KW

- tf

 

As I recall a company has already put four 9700 cores on a single board before...worth over $25K apparently. I'll see if I can dig up a link.

EDIT: Linky
Another link