[SGVLUG] Dual video cards -- possible/supported?

[Emerson, Tom]

I just got an alienware ad in my inbox -- it seems they have a couple of
models of notebooks that have DUAL video cards -- per the site, one card
renders "the top half of the display", while the second card manages the
lower half.

Is this via a really funky proprietary driver, or (since these are
nvidia cards I think...) is there an existing linux driver that would
support this sort of processing?  (I presume there is an inter-card
connector that passes through "the other half" of the video signal to
the actual VGA/DVI connector -- that *should* independent of any
software, but I'll bet a corner or two was cut...)

I suppose in a truly perfect world, the cards would look like a single
card/device to the hardware, with one card handling the interface to the
computer (so the "driver" doesn't have to decide which device to send
vertex data to in the event the "triangle" the vertices define crosses
the mid-screen boundary) while the other card managed the
synchronization of the outputs.  Actually, now that I think about it, it
has to be this way -- you might send data that technically resides in
one half of the display, but then perform a transformation "in the card"
(for scaling, rotation, or whatever) that physically moves the vertex to
the "other half" of the screen.

Tom Emerson
818-977-8828