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

[Michael Proctor-Smith]

On 6/29/06, juanslayton at dialup4less.com <juanslayton at dialup4less.com> wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>    Sounds like a machine that is set up to support one of the multi-head extensions.  Check Xinerama, Backstreet Ruby, or Xephyr, for starters.  Xinerama in particular can spread a screen over two monitors, either side by side, or one over the other.

You guys are missing an important part of dual rendering technology
think of it a Symmetrical multi processing(SMP) for graphics
processors. Sense GPUs are really special perpose processing units. In
effect they multi-thread the rendering part of the graphics
driver(openGL) and spread the rendering over both of the avaliable
GPUs. As the ad aluded to current NVidia technology may render half
the screen on each board the stich them to gether. I believe older
3dfx technology render everyother line on a differant processor.

The NVidia drivers also support Xinerama under X-windows. Even across
multiple closely related video chipsets. At SCALE this year I had
three physial outputs on two cards acting as a 3840x1024 display. This
is differant from SLI which would create a faster standard sized
display on one monitor.