Alienwares new graphics solution
 

With intel theyve developed a new kind of motherboard with 2 pci-express slots. Its capable of taking 2 pci-e graphics cards and running them together in "afr" mode (alternate frame rendering). Basically one card draws the top half of the screen and the other card draws the bottom half of the screen, seems a little similar to scan line interleave with 2 voodoo 2's linked together.

Supposodly this can work with 2 different kinds of cards, nvidia and ati cards could be used together in one system to get a big performance increase in games.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=43

2 pci cards aren't worth 1 agp card.

Pci express cards, its faster than agp.

rock:

Thats pretty neat.

another invention to drain the pockets of the customer

I suppose it depends on the performance increse you get, with 2 voodoo 2's in sli mode you got pretty much double the performance of 1 voodoo 2, ati and nvidia's current mainstream cards are all 1 core and ati have only attempted a 2 core sli board once before and it was shit. If its something like a 30% increse then its probably not worth it considering its probably gonna cost a bomb.

Aye, true. Pretty cool idea though.

That's one of the two things I thought.

The second was: YES! Why ? Because you won't need such advanced video
cards anymore. Since the card only has to draw half of the total screen res,
(for example, 1024x768 will become 512x384 - much less taxing) it won't
have such a hard time anymore and thus, you should save about 50-100$
after purchasing both cards instead of one monster agp. This presupposes
that PCI-E cards won't cost an arm...

Nah they'll be on par with current agp 8x pricing id assume. Only real advantage pci-e offers is more bandwidth simaltaniously on the upstream and downstream, agp 8x full potential hasn't been reached yet and i doubt it will reach it, doesn't seem like it'll get the chance.

[quote:6a9fa]Nah they'll be on par with current agp 8x pricing id assume. [/quote:6a9fa]

Excellent. In that case, specialty cards with less memory but full DX9 support
will be released specifically for dual-video processing purposes. They have no
excuse now: if prices go up, they're giving consumers Thumbzilla.

stfu

Stop ruining threads with your bullshit, Judas. the_finger:

Can't you also have 2 processors? That would pwn everything outa the water. Imagin 6.5 gig power biggrin:

They'd have to do major motherboard form factor changes to allow multi
processor support without special in-game programming...