Dual 3D cards for Gaming Nikhil RastogiEmailPrint May 13, 2004 First came Dual CPU's to give that extra edge for number crunching. Now welcome Dual 3D cards for monstrous polygon crunching and additional eye candy. Feel those severed limbs fly across the screen…sweet!

Alienware, the leading manufacturer of high-performance desktop computers, notebooks, and professional systems unveiled yesterday at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Video Array and X2 - an exclusive, patent pending technology designed to significantly enhance the performance of graphic intensive applications including extreme gaming, flight training - simulation modules, professional design and engineering, real-time rendering and animation.


Video Array is an Accelerated Graphics Processing (AGP) subsystem that will allow users to add multiple, off-the-shelf video cards to their computer systems and have both cards process graphic commands in parallel. Understanding the wide-ranging wants and needs of its customers; Alienware designed its solution so that it is not tied to any one specific video card. This design will allow users to take full advantage of the fastest video card on the market for a significant performance increase.

Alienwares exclusive Video Array combined with X2, an Alienware designed motherboard currently based on Intel's next-generation chipset, will include dual PCI-Express high performance graphics card slots. The new Video Array Technology and X2 motherboard will enable users to run graphics intensive applications flawlessly at maximized settings, render 3D visuals in record time, and much more.

The Alienware Video Array and X2 motherboard will debut in Q3/Q4, exclusively through Alienware's new ALX brand, a family of extreme performance systems catering to the demands of the most hardcore PC enthusiasts.

As of now, Alienware plans to sell its ALX systems only in the United States. As and when Alienware proves their technological prowess, one can expect motherboards with dual PCI-Express 3D cards becoming a standard in the industry.

About Alienware Corporation - Alienware Corporation manufactures high-performance computer desktops and mobile systems and leading-edge professional systems. It offers unique and award-winning products that incorporate state-of-the-art components, innovative engineering and design. Alienware systems are available direct within the United States and Europe.

 

Nothing new here - I seem to remember being able to link a second (and third??) card to boost 3D gaming - didn't do too much for 2D as the additional cabling needed took the edge off the image a little.

I still have one of the cards somewhere - 12mb if I remember correctly!

 

As XRS says, you could do that with the 3DFX voodoo cards years back!

 

Yes I know I had one - it was a 4mb 2D card linked by external cable to an Orchid 3DFX.


This is multiple processing though (like rendering using 32 pipelines instead of 16) therefore no slowdown and 2 x 256 DDR3 ram would be nice for texture memory.

 

The Voodoo's went inline from your 2D card via a VGA pass thru.

The Voodoo 2 (IIRC) had a thing called SLI where you could pair up two cards with an IDE-esq ribbon cable.

 

SLI = Scan Line Interleaving. Two 3D cards in the system with one card doing the odd lines and the other doing the even lines.

This "new" architecture is along the same lines as the VSA (Voodoo Scalable Architecture) which appeared on the Voodoo4, 5 and 6 cards which had one, two and four processors respectively, with only one physical card in the system. The two main problems with that architecture were heat and power consumption. There just wasn't enough power available from the AGP slot to power even two of the VSA processors. The Voodoo 6 was even worse, having four processors and requiring an external power supply.