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Alienware PC To Contain Two Graphics Cards

Posted by NEXTY on 13 May 2004 - 11:24 · 89 comments & 8404 views

Alienware Corp. has designed a "video array" that places two PC graphics cards in parallel on a single motherboard, an innovation that could dramatically its PCs' graphics processing power. According to an Alienware spokesman, the company believes Video Array will offer between 50 to 90 percent more performance than a single graphics card. A custom-designed "X2" motherboard using an Intel-based chipset will support graphics cards from either ATI Technologies Inc. or Nvidia Corp. "We've completely moved the benchmark," an Alienware spokesman said.

The Alienware Video Array and X2 motherboard will debut either late in the third quarter or early in the fourth quarter, exclusively through Alienware's new ALX brand, catering to high-performance gamers, the company said. The technology looks remarkably similar to the Parallel Graphics Configuration graphics card maker Metabyte Technology pioneered in 1999, when it took two Voodoo 2 SLI cards from 3Dfx Technology and ran them in parallel. The Voodoo 2 Scan-Line Interleave technology allowed the two graphics cards to draw alternating horizontal lines of resolution; Metabyte slightly altered the technology, allowing each card to draw one half of the screen. The Metabyte PGC technology was eventually purchased by Alienware, although the PC maker never shipped any products based on the technology.

News source: extremetech.com

Like the PGC, the two cards won't always divvy up processing tasks equally. If the 3D perspective looks toward a horizon with a relatively simple skyscape above, the second card may be pressed into duty to render the more complex portions of the scene, the spokesman said.

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#1 Posted by soloredd on 13 May 2004 - 11:29: Great
More ways to get money from us. Surely you wouldn't be able to have one of the video cards bottleneck the other, so would you have to buy 2 of the same? This seems stupid to me; but, what do I know with my limited income?

#2 Posted by lieb39 on 13 May 2004 - 11:37: Sounds cool. I wouldn't be able to afford it but still cool.

-lieb39

#3 Posted by YaZoR on 13 May 2004 - 11:38: For some reason, I fail to see this coming to any use.

(13 replies) #4 Posted by qwertyuiop1 on 13 May 2004 - 11:40: Video cards are not the bottleneck in PCs, its the hard drive.

Until we get faster drives - and I mean *really fast* - we are always going to have this bottleneck

(5 replies) #5 Posted by YaZoR on 13 May 2004 - 11:46: Example:

1x GeForce 4 Ti4200
1x Radeon 9700Pro

I want to play far cry, but oh no, i have to have ps2.0 disabled cause the gf4 can't do it. DOH!

Doesn't make any sense to me.

(1 reply) #6 Posted by DjmUK on 13 May 2004 - 11:47: Reminds me of the Voodoo 2 cards. You could physically connect 2x cards via a provided cable and use both cards as one. Sounds like Alienware are going back to those days.

But hey, if you can get either:
- 2x ATi Radeon X800 XT
- 2x Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra

Working together, then I'd like to see benchmark results showing how much of an increase we're talking about.
- First dual displays
- Then dual CPU's
- Then dual GPU's (single board)
- Then dual GPU's (multi board)
- Then dual core CPU's
- Also dual HDD's
- Dual Memory DIMM's
- Dual PSU's
- Dual speakers (stereo), then 7.1

Why is everything in two's...just buy two single computers and then connect them together and you're sorted. But, it does work far quicker and it is far smaller than buy 2 PC's.

I'm not complaining, I'm waiting for the Pentium 5 with dual core's, then I'll think about multiple GPU's

#7 Posted by pctuk on 13 May 2004 - 11:48: Great stuff. If they can get over the technical problems - and by publicising it they obviously think they can - this could be a big change.

(6 replies) #8 Posted by Panorama on 13 May 2004 - 11:52: Sweet. I'd like to have 2x ATI x800 XT or 2x Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra in my machine.

#9 Posted by Trajik 2600 on 13 May 2004 - 12:14: How much heat would two very powerful GPU's sitting next to each other put off? The TV tuner alone on my old ATI AIW 128 Pro ruined a couple of NICs I had sitting in the PCI slot next to it.

#10 Posted by ProgramGeek on 13 May 2004 - 12:31: It just doesn't sound very cost-effective to me.. But I guess that's one way to get grossingly good game performance. I think we are better off just sticking with one vid card

(5 replies) #11 Posted by MrRogers on 13 May 2004 - 12:38

QUOTE

an innovation that could dramatically its PCs' graphics processing power

Wow, I wish I could dramatically my car or motorcycle. Better yet dramatically my TV into a plasma!

#11.1 Posted by SirEvan on 13 May 2004 - 13:45: damnit MrRodgers, you beat me to it.. I was just about to say almost the exact same thing. Whats wrong with peoples spelling and grammar these days? It F'in sucks. Everyone needs to go back to school NOW!

#11.2 Posted by threedaysdwn on 13 May 2004 - 15:26: It's not a spelling or grammatical error... they just left out a word. The author was probably distracted, or took a break from his writing at that spot and left it off when he came back.

Still, this is why proofreading is important.

#11.3 Posted by IGx89 on 13 May 2004 - 16:23: Can't resist: SirEvan, in your comment you have an extra period and are missing an apostrophe and a capital letter .

#11.4 Posted by Surr3al on 13 May 2004 - 19:46: Hahaha ^^

I guess it's best not to criticize when you yourself aren't proofreading your own posts.

As for MrRogers, well done. I was about to post the same thing. I obviously read the news post a bit too late.

#11.5 Posted by demorgoron on 14 May 2004 - 03:39: that computer will dramatically rock

(6 replies) #12 Posted by mcb on 13 May 2004 - 12:41: here's my question: why cant the gfx card be used as a secondary processor to your main cpu when you arent running a game or graphics-intensive application?

its a ridiculous amount of power sitting there idle when your just in windows struggling to run slow crap

#13 Posted by donachello on 13 May 2004 - 12:44: This would be very expensive...

(2 replies) #14 Posted by Grappa on 13 May 2004 - 12:50: Hard to see how they're going to make money on this one when so few people can actually afford it.

(1 reply) #15 Posted by KayMan2K on 13 May 2004 - 12:58: I used to have two Voodoo 2 cards running in parrallel. It really did speed up the drawing. I am looking forward to the rebirth of this technology.

(1 reply) #16 Posted by donachello on 13 May 2004 - 13:07: Ooh they were the days two 3DFX Voodoo cards linked in SLI mode with a link cable from your Voodoo card to your AGP running Opengel...

I spent £1000.00 for two cards in 1997 or 98... and Quake 1 was awesome graphics with these cards... Oh they were they days...

#17 Posted by neufuse on 13 May 2004 - 13:14: so whats the diffrence of just haveing two GPU's on one card? the big problem is the processing ability of the GPU's anyways, so make multiple GPU's run in parallel, split the rendering up and handle it like that. That is how we render high resolution movies here at DreamWorks... we have GPU cards that have up to 20 processors on a single card rendering per machine in the rendering farm.

(4 replies) #18 Posted by nonick on 13 May 2004 - 13:22: so no one noticed that there is a word missing in the article? second line - "increases" should be added.

(1 reply) #19 Posted by AquaFX on 13 May 2004 - 13:37: they charge too much the way it is now...there gonna charge way over when that comes out..

(3 replies) #20 Posted by Fredde87 on 13 May 2004 - 14:08: http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/images/e32004/alienware_video_array.jpg

heres a picture of it...

edit: it is also PCI express based so you wont be able to use most cards mentioned above...

#21 Posted by Caleb on 13 May 2004 - 14:39: It also says that you need 2 identical cards for this to work (DOH!!!)

(1 reply) #22 Posted by AquaDex on 13 May 2004 - 14:51: Darn Alien PCs, now I need 8 eyes to use this thing and it costs hella lot of money to do the eye upgrade at Mars Medical...

#23 Posted by scoult01 on 13 May 2004 - 15:33: If only they could sell their cases by themselves

(1 reply) #24 Posted by Fonze on 13 May 2004 - 16:38: I can't believe you guys think this is useless. If they have one card render half a frame and have the other card render the second half, it would be insanely fast. It's like buying a dual processor system that could process 1 thread on both processors. That means 2 2ghz cpus would almost equal 4ghz.
Even if this isn't used for gameing, which it may not since it would probably cost too much for even power gamers, it could be used by GFX studios in workstations.
Seems that raiding hardware is a trend, 2 cpus(not quite raiding but almost), HD raids, DDR Ram

#25 Posted by Gary_Player on 13 May 2004 - 16:42: Knew it was gonna happen...although I wouldnt quite expect a 90% boost thats probably a bit exagerated

(2 replies) #26 Posted by Ghostdraconi on 13 May 2004 - 19:17: This sounds like it will be a great system. I see some people are worried about the cost, but anyone who buys an Alienware system probably is more worried about performance that cost.

#27 Posted by DsnBehind on 13 May 2004 - 19:59: Say what you will about Alienware, but the purple case with blue glow is damn pretty!

(2 replies) #28 Posted by patseguin on 13 May 2004 - 20:54: "an innovation that could dramatically its PCs' graphics processing power"

Dramatically what? Nice grammar.

#29 Posted by ZTrang on 14 May 2004 - 01:23: I wonder if this will make it to open market, or whether it will remain an "exclusive" Alienware technology. The speed advantage should definitely be huge, given that two cards will collectively render twice as much in the same amount of time (obviously that is theoretical, and driver inefficiencies and such will lower the benefit, but it will still be massive). But why stop here? Why not make a motherboard with three, four five, or six hundred card slots??? Just imagine it: 300 FPS in Far Cry at maximum detail... I shudder at the thought (actually, your computer would melt down after about two seconds, but that is beside the point). Reallly, it would be prohibitively expensive, but somebody could get insane benchmark scores by threading together enough parallel cards.

#30 Posted by mad_scientist on 14 May 2004 - 01:25: i want one
*breaks into alienware n steals very nice pc

(1 reply) #31 Posted by KevinRGood on 14 May 2004 - 02:56: Now you're playing with POWER! Wait...isn't that Nintendo's old slogan?

(1 reply) #32 Posted by Shifty on 14 May 2004 - 13:34: if they do this, that would mean dual AGP ports and having to increase the
bus between the CPU, RAM and Northbridge chipset. current hight end AGP cards
almost saturate the the AGP bus...
if they dont fix the bandwidth issue there, then having dual AGP cards would be a
mute point...

#33 Posted by cesardrgn on 15 May 2004 - 22:02: I'm not interested on buying that...

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