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Thread: PCI-Xpress, possible VGA expansions ??

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    PCI-Xpress, possible VGA expansions ??

    Sorry, no new info here , just thinking about the future possibilities for Graphics cards with PCI-Xpress starting to show up on motherboards.

    I was thinking, obviously unlike AGP slots, motherboards will not only have one PCI-xpress slot, so is there a chance that in the future you could again see the old 3dfx option of having more than one VGA card in your system and daisy chaining them for increased VGA processing power ?
    Even it could be parcticaly possible thinking about it I doubt ATI or Nvidia would want people proping up their old cards instead of shelling out for new ones, but just wondering what people thought ?
    Desktop: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton, 1024Mb PC-3200 TwinMOS w/Winbond, MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, Radeon 9800SE AIW, 40 GB 7,200 Rpm Hitachi Deskstar, 120GB 7,200 Rpm 8mb Cache Maxtor Diamond 9, 160GB 7200 Rpm 8mb Cache Seagate 7200.7 SATA, Plextor 708A 8x DVD-RW, 550W PFC Q-tec PSU, Casetek 1019SM Silver Case, Camdridge Soundworks DTT2200 Speakers

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    I thought that the motherboards will only have one PCI-Express slot and the rest will be PCI-X. According to what i read PCI-X is the latest version of the PCI bus. PCI-Express was shown in pics i saw and there was only one PCI-Express bus on the board

    argh just noticed your sig, it's TwinMOS not "twinmoss" !

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    HEXUS webmaster Steve's Avatar
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    OK, so let's say there will be more than one PCI-Express slot - the problem of assigning tasks to the GPU becomes a problem.

    Now I don't know how far along the XGI dual GPU card is going, but it probably won't be all that good anyway.

    If you look at all the dual GPU attempts there have been, none have really taken off that much. So, I doubt we'd see anything like what you suggest - nothing good anyway...

    edit: As a side note, who'd fancy a dual GPU Radeon 9800 MAXX?


    http://www.hwupgrade.it/i.php?img=scheda_big.jpg

    It doesn't work, it was just Sapphire messing about trying to show off, so unfortunately we'll probably never see one, lol.
    Last edited by Steve; 07-03-2004 at 09:14 PM.
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    ah, I thought PCI-X was just a shortened version of PCI-Xpress, whoops

    oh well, I can always hope. Its just me trying to come to terms with the sad realisation that my failed softmod 9800se AIW just doesn't cut it for top gaming
    And my wallet can't keep up with the pace ! lol
    I have been playing the far cry demo and, althought it looks great, it isn't completely smooth, but when I softmod for 8 pipelines it runs perfectly smooth, and get the checkerboard effect, no help lowering the core/mem clocks
    I really wish I hadn't spent the £150 on this now, you can pickup 9800 Pros for less than £130 now .... and I got sky+ which means I dont really use the VI/VO features anymore ...

    I would love one os those dual GPU cards though
    Or failing that, one of the couple of 3dfx 4 (or was it 8 ) GPU cards, they really look fancy. Did you see the one that went for a couple of thousand £££@s on ebay ?
    Anyway, back to the point in hand for a second , about dealing out processing jobs to more than one GPU, wouldn't it be just like having dual CPU's ?
    Last edited by Lexeus; 07-03-2004 at 10:58 PM.
    Desktop: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton, 1024Mb PC-3200 TwinMOS w/Winbond, MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, Radeon 9800SE AIW, 40 GB 7,200 Rpm Hitachi Deskstar, 120GB 7,200 Rpm 8mb Cache Maxtor Diamond 9, 160GB 7200 Rpm 8mb Cache Seagate 7200.7 SATA, Plextor 708A 8x DVD-RW, 550W PFC Q-tec PSU, Casetek 1019SM Silver Case, Camdridge Soundworks DTT2200 Speakers

    Laptop: Clevo D470W - 17" Widescreen TFT, Intel Pentium4 3.06Ghz 533FSB, 1024Mb PC-2700 Hynix, Radeon Mobility 9000 64Mb, Fujitsu 80Gb 4,200rpm, 250Gb 7,2000rpm 8mb Cache Maxtor OneTouch, Toshiba SD-R6372 DVD-RW +/- x4, Built-in Four speakers, webcam and microphone

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    Quote Originally Posted by KeZZeR
    argh just noticed your sig, it's TwinMOS not "twinmoss" !
    By the way, after double checking with the stickers on my RAM apprently you are correct, but don't worry, a quick work over with the magic marker and I fixed the problem
    Desktop: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton, 1024Mb PC-3200 TwinMOS w/Winbond, MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, Radeon 9800SE AIW, 40 GB 7,200 Rpm Hitachi Deskstar, 120GB 7,200 Rpm 8mb Cache Maxtor Diamond 9, 160GB 7200 Rpm 8mb Cache Seagate 7200.7 SATA, Plextor 708A 8x DVD-RW, 550W PFC Q-tec PSU, Casetek 1019SM Silver Case, Camdridge Soundworks DTT2200 Speakers

    Laptop: Clevo D470W - 17" Widescreen TFT, Intel Pentium4 3.06Ghz 533FSB, 1024Mb PC-2700 Hynix, Radeon Mobility 9000 64Mb, Fujitsu 80Gb 4,200rpm, 250Gb 7,2000rpm 8mb Cache Maxtor OneTouch, Toshiba SD-R6372 DVD-RW +/- x4, Built-in Four speakers, webcam and microphone

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    HEXUS webmaster Steve's Avatar
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    Dual CPU's handle different processes, dual GPU's are rendering frames for the same display. The best way to implement dual GPU's seems to be have one GPU rendering one frame while the next frame is being worked out by the other GPU. However, putting this in to practice can be tricky (though I'm no graphics card engineer so I'm lost as to how they do it, lol.)
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    Quote Originally Posted by kez
    Dual CPU's handle different processes, dual GPU's are rendering frames for the same display. The best way to implement dual GPU's seems to be have one GPU rendering one frame while the next frame is being worked out by the other GPU. However, putting this in to practice can be tricky (though I'm no graphics card engineer so I'm lost as to how they do it, lol.)

    I am sure in reality its all very simple and there is nothing really to it


    Bring on the Pound Shop's Video Card Sale !


    ***and, wake up****
    Desktop: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton, 1024Mb PC-3200 TwinMOS w/Winbond, MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, Radeon 9800SE AIW, 40 GB 7,200 Rpm Hitachi Deskstar, 120GB 7,200 Rpm 8mb Cache Maxtor Diamond 9, 160GB 7200 Rpm 8mb Cache Seagate 7200.7 SATA, Plextor 708A 8x DVD-RW, 550W PFC Q-tec PSU, Casetek 1019SM Silver Case, Camdridge Soundworks DTT2200 Speakers

    Laptop: Clevo D470W - 17" Widescreen TFT, Intel Pentium4 3.06Ghz 533FSB, 1024Mb PC-2700 Hynix, Radeon Mobility 9000 64Mb, Fujitsu 80Gb 4,200rpm, 250Gb 7,2000rpm 8mb Cache Maxtor OneTouch, Toshiba SD-R6372 DVD-RW +/- x4, Built-in Four speakers, webcam and microphone

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    i was thinking that pci-xpress would mean that you could finally hook up 2 agp-style (as in high-end, not the normal low-end cards you get for pci;) cards and have proper dual-screen setups.
    dual processors on graphics cards, even modern ones should be easy as far as i understand it. at the moment when rendering a 3d image, the processor is doing massive parallel processing on several vectors and things at once, so another processor in the mix and you've doubled the amount of stuff it can deal with at once.
    i doubt it would be like having dual cpu's.
    Last edited by këö¬t; 07-03-2004 at 11:55 PM. Reason: forgot to click 'Disable smilies in text'



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    Senior Member SilentDeath's Avatar
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    PCI is the normal slot that everyone has.
    PCI-X is the 64 bit slot commonly found in servers. It looks like two normal PCI end to end - just a longer conenctor..
    PCI-EXpress is the new one. Theres two main speeds we will see first, 16x will be used for gfx, and there wil be one per mobo, and for other stuff there will be 1x slots, which are still faster than normal pci.

    Dual gpu has a lot of problems. Most cards using multiple gpu work by rendering line by line, like on voodoo2 with SLI. FOr example with 2 cards, one will do all the odd numered lines, while the otehr does the even numebred lines. They then get stored in a framebuffer and are then output to display. Dual gpu is just like using two cards in SLI.
    Another problem is the memory. GPU's have never been designed, afaik, to share memory. That means they each have there own mem chips.
    Then theres problems with space. Dual gpu's means the card will be a LOT longer, as most of the components needed cant be shared, so almsot 2x more components, also making cards more expensive to make.
    Also GPU's are now at 40-80w of heat. Two means double the heat on the same area. This causes another problem for the card manuf. Selling components to OEM companys is the most profitable, and typicly they prefer cards under 60-70w.

    voodoo5 5500 was dual gpu. Was quite a good card. It didnt have any major problems, apart from that it was old and outdated at its release. The voodoo5 6000 was quad gpu and was never released. It had major problems with rendering which caused 32bit to look worse than 16bit as well as other problems.
    Single gpu cards are best.

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    ah, well i knew PCI-X wasn't PCI-Express. Odd thing is, when i looked up about it, it referred to PCMCIA releasing a card this year called "NEW CARD" which was designed for small systems such as SFF's. Interesting stuff, interesting diagram of it

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