hey guys

tihis is jus me havin a random moment and decided to post it...thought it might make intresting conversation.

i was looking at graphics cards today and was thinking about beowulf clusters at the same time (for those who dont know what a beowulf cluster is it it parallel computing... by networking many pcs together and using the overall processing power calculations can be done faster) and thought about the idea of parallel graphics processing.

this idea isnt original as there have been a few graphics cards with dual gpus for example the xgi v8 there was an old ati..and i even found info about a sapphire 9800 dual gpu card looked neat but willnever be made...but these are all dual gpu cards why not have two cards....because agp is designed to be singular of coarse and pci is pants... but with pci x i can see high end boards having 2 or more 16x slots therefore allowing for 2 beefy graphics cards

now i dont know how they currently design parallel graphics processing but i thought if u have 2 cards and u want parallel processing i could see it being done as each card renders half of the final out put screen then these recombined say by a daughter card
this would mean each card would be rendering an image only 512x768 instead of the whole 1024 and because each is doin half the work u can in effect push it till they are both working to there max


well guys if u read this i hope it was of intrest as thats why i bothered to post it im sure there is good reasonds why this cant be done if any of u know properly why then please post and yes i would not expect a perfect doubled performance ppl lol so u dont need to say that i have myself built a cluster b4

I know that Sapphire one will not be made, but it was around when PCI-x was only talked about, to my knowledge...anyways i think with the PCI-x dual GPU's will come into play with the high bandwith..with AGP 8x it just doesnt make sense.

well tbh i dont think itll play much of a part of graphics card future as pcix 16x is big and with what seems to be in the works for the major players should be immense single gpu cards anyway

this is jus a thing really for us geeks who want to jus go that one step over the top like we take great pleasure in doing

The only problem is really hardware sync - in that you have two cards and two outputs but the monitor only has one input so some sort of mediation hardware might be necessary if you're talking multiple CARDS one monitor.

Multiple GPUs one monitor is a whole nother story.

As is Multiple cards multiple monitors

-MF

This has been done before. I seem to remember a model of 3dfx card where if you had two you could hook them together with a cable and display on one monitor, with twice the processing power.