Opinions needed on this Interview

[mashie]

Dongle/AMR pic
http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=375877

Sorry if this has already been posted...

Hmm, looks like two DVI to VGA converters.

 

[Dave Baumann]

How the fuck could a tiled solution operate over an analogue link?

 

[trinibwoy]

How the fuck could a tiled solution operate over an analogue link?

 

[Jawed]

I bet that pic is nothing more than a PC driving four monitors.

I don't see any dongle.

Jawed

 

[mashie]

How the fuck could a tiled solution operate over an analogue link?

Lol, not to mention it is two X600 cards

 

[Xmas]

Sure, it's faster, and it looks good if you prefer angles to curves (a nicely-implemented DVI-DVI connector would look sweet IMO), but it loses in terms of design/implementation elegance IMO. Nvidia's setup requires load-balancing in the drivers, identical cards, custom PCBs, precise distance between cards, a reasonably expensive bridge component etc. ATI's just needs the driver to understand to send the data to both cards, what's presumably a fairly small tweak to the actual chip to work out which tiles should be rendered by each card, another larger core tweak to recombine (unless it's on a seperate chip on the PCB), and a cheap cable to connect the two. Moreover, it doesn't need identical cards, works backwards with cards people already own, probably works seamlessly with onboard graphics and should scale in all directions with ease. That's the way I see it, anyway

I prefer internal connectors to external loop cables.

I'm pretty sure the bridge connector is cheaper than a DVI cable. AFAIK there's also a ribbon cable version. Load balancing is pretty cheap as well (and I'm not even sure it's done by the driver at all).

Most of the higher-end GeForce 6 cards are already SLI capable, and that's the standard PCB.

For ATI's hypothetical method you need a special master card, and the connector takes up some backplate space. How it works out with different cards remains to be seen.

 

[mashie]

For ATI's hypothetical method you need a special master card, and the connector takes up some backplate space. How it works out with different cards remains to be seen.

Who knows, all new cards might have some kind of bidirectional DVI port?

 

[Geo]

How the fuck could a tiled solution operate over an analogue link?

Hey, modems did it for twenty years!

[you asked 'how' ]

 

[Charmaka]

Heh, can't really justify the "elegance" thing, it's just the way I look at it I guess. Not a big deal either way.

From DB's reaction I'm guessing that it's non-trivial to combine analogue signals even if you know precisely which bits are being dropped in each?

 

[mashie]

Heh, can't really justify the "elegance" thing, it's just the way I look at it I guess. Not a big deal either way.

From DB's reaction I'm guessing that it's non-trivial to combine analogue signals even if you know precisely which bits are being dropped in each?

The number one problem with analogue is timing and signal degration converting from digital to analogue to digital coming a close second.