Possible?
Any of the following possible?
A motherboard with 2 AGP slots?
Maybe the ability for that motherboard to run both Card's at one time doubling the effect?
Possibly putting several Video Cards in a chain to work as ONE single card through one AGP slot?
It would be cool to see 5 TNT Card's chain linked running the same speed as a GF4 LOL(of course I know it wouldn't have all the other technologies like Pixil Shaders and such).
A motherboard with 2 AGP slots?
Maybe the ability for that motherboard to run both Card's at one time doubling the effect?
Possibly putting several Video Cards in a chain to work as ONE single card through one AGP slot?
It would be cool to see 5 TNT Card's chain linked running the same speed as a GF4 LOL(of course I know it wouldn't have all the other technologies like Pixil Shaders and such).
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Comments
NS
Basically, no, no, and......no.
You can run one AGP and several PCI if needed. Go matrox for that.
~dodo
That is NOT what I mean, I have been there, done that.
What I want to do is get down and dirty and chain link a few cards together. I was hoping maybe there was a guide out there that talked of the wiring process and such for soldering and connecting them. Yes I shall do it, but when is the real question.
However under PCI Express (PCI replacement slots due next year) 2 linked Video card MIGHT be possible.
Also Didn't Quantum3D do something like this back in the Voodoo2 days with up to 4 video cards?? I think the Voodoo5 was supposed to do something like this also. RIP 3DFX
Remember the ATI Rage Fury Maxx? A 64 MB, 2 GPU video card that rendered alternating frames? When it was first released, it was insanely expensive and utilized the underpowered Rage 128 GPU (or quite possibly the Rage Pro Turbo), making it one of the most short lived ATI products ever created.
In order to create a "home made" SLI interface, you would have to make the following modifications to your system:
1) Create a dedicated, multiplexed transfer pathway for data to be shared between each GPU & onboard memory. With the AGP 3.0 specification, 32 signalling lines are used for each video card (24 if you don't utilize Side Band Addressing).
2) If you created your multiplexed transfer pathway to utilize the same number of signalling lines as AGP, you would have no problem interfacing with the system core logic's AGP controller as long as the controller was designed to be able to handle the amount of data being shunted to it.
3) You would have to write a device driver for the hardware to correctly function. The easiest approach to this would be to get your linked video cards to render opposite frames, essentially reducing the amount of work each video card must perform on the scene by a factor determined by the number of video cards you have.
Eg, 4 video cards, rendering alternating frames, would reduce the load on each video card to a total of 25% of the original load.
4) Finally, you would have to find a way to interlink all of the video card monitor outputs and reduce them to 1 output to interface with the monitor. As well, you would have to find a way for the video cards to output the frames rendered in the correct order. If not, you risk the problem of having frames being displayed that were rendered BEFORE the one on the screen, making it quite difficult to play games (or even utilize the computer)
If you do manage to get any of this to work, it would be neat to see a guide for it.
//Edit: Has anyone ever heard of an AGP riser card? Essentially a daughterboard that plugs into the AGP slot vertically and allows for additional AGP expansion slots?
~dodo