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zima 2003-11-10 01:37
At 2cpu.com forum I've read some time ago that somebody there presumably menaged to get hardware acceleration in games stretched (I don't know if this was stretched display (is it even possible in this configuration?) or d3d game in a window with hardware acceleration) across three independent video cards.
But there's presumably one condition (from what I remember from this thread there): the cards MUST be EXACTLY the same, which means also using only one bus for them (btw, and there was also how agp is evil because it limited us for things like this for so long ;P )
So here's the question: is it possible? And I (and probably everyone else) don't want the answer based on theoretical guesses (I can do that myself), but I mean rather:
does someone here have the system with only THREE identical, rather recent, graphic cards on pci, not even one more, (or can assemble such system easily) each with only one monitor, and is able to investigate? I'm sure a lot of people would be thankfull, me included for sure :>
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Christian Studer 2003-11-10 02:10
As far as I can tell that's impossible with Direct3D, unless the application is specially programmed to support this, for example the Moire screen saver. Hardware acceleration is always per monitor.
In span mode, the operating system only sees a single monitor, so it would work with any application in this case.
OpenGL is a bit different: with multiple Nvidia cards, you can get hardware acceleration on every monitor, even with windows stretched across the different cards. The cards don't have to be the same, for example I'm using two GeForce4 MX cards and a GeForce2 MX. This is because the Nvidia drivers have special support for this.
During my own testing, I couldn't get games running reliably though, most crashed after a short time. This was some time ago, might be better with the latest drivers.
Christian Studer - www.realtimesoft.com
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zima 2003-11-10 02:35
Christian, did you use exactly the same cards, or for example one agp and two pci? (from what I remember/read, it's CRITICAL factor having all cards on the same bus)
and as far as what games would support this spanned configuration with three pci cards - I'd guess every game that can do surroundgaming on Parhelia.
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