Hi
the 6970 both DirectCU and the 2slots seem pretty nice.
I wonder if the DirectCU version fill leave some room on http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3449#ov for another PCI express card, namely this one [http://www.grassvalley.com/products/pegasus](http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3449#ov](http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3449#ov) for another PCI express card, namely this one [http://www.grassvalley.com/products/pegasus)
regardless that the 6970 DirectCU II occupies 3 slots, it says in its specifications Bus Standard PCI Express 2.1.
but your Mainboard specifies its expansion slots as PCI Express 2.0
i’m not that deep into hardware to know if this is a problem.
we use P8P67 EVO-boards, although those also are specified as PCI Express 2.0
btw.: the rumours around GIGABYTE boards aren’t the very best?!?
but anyway i myself don’t have a good opinion of ASUS mainboards; had 3 broken one’s in the past.
go for asus ws class boards (expensive but well worth it), or even better intel. that, a good psu and ram certified for the board will let you avoid 99% of hardware woes imho…
hehe just burned asus rog rampage II 5 days ago, so pain to repair raids…
took new rampage 3… Still have no time to test it finnaly lol
GTX 590’s steroid heating machine
i had a headache with ATI recently (projectors popping in and out of existence)
and had to switch to NVidia
Don’t touch the Zotac with 3 display ports + DVI-I
It’s basically like having a 2 head graphics with a janky triplehead that gives out the 3 display ports (they’re not independent outputs)
Don’t think about ‘Crossfire’ or ‘SLI’
With 2 graphics cards, you turn all that off if you want more outputs
I think for you the cleanest route is:
NVidia cheapo -> 1 heads you can use for monitor
-> 1 spare head for another monitor (handy for a preview render)
NVidia expenso -> Matrox TH2G Digital Edition -1-> Projector 1
-1-> Projector 2
-> Matrox TH2G Digital Edition -1-> Projector 3
-1-> Projector 4
That way you can have 2 renderers
(P1,P2) + (P3,P4)
I suggest TH2G Digital edition, because the DH2G Digital edition doesn’t have DVI input (weird I know), and you might also want the third channel later on.
You’ll likely be using VGA anyway for long lengths, so also feel free to save some cash with DH2G Analog edition. Analog also sometimes introduces random pixel offsets (<20px in x) which aren’t always your best friend!
This is the setup i’m considering buying now:
http://pastehtml.com/view/b1yz23ua8.rtxt
I believe that most VVVV users aren’t shifting enough over the PCI-E bus to justify 16x (regardless of how fantastic the card is). Generally once your textures and meshes are loaded, you’re sending minimal data over that bus.
e.g. with Natan’s awesome GPU particle library, once it’s initialised, all the data is already on the GPU. Nothing’s getting passed backwards and forth.
Generally the heaviest use of the bus is shifting video back and forth, or if you’ve got lots of otherwise dynamically generated textures / meshes (which is only really possible in plugins, because otherwise the biggest slowdown is converting the VVVV Value to uchar / float for the textures, which is happening on your CPU)
Elliot
Just to confirm. No NVidia cards with 3 simultaneous outputs yet? there’s lots with 3 connectors but i presume one is debunked when you use the other 2.
Hi Elliot
(my Korean friend is finally and soon preparing some kimchi for a “hot chili” competition vvvv vs vdmx)
do you mean using 2 video cards WITHOUT sli? I didn t even think it was possible, I am pretty much ignorant on this kind of setup, this very one machine I am using right now has got an AGP slot…
I am going to use a capture card pretty much of the time, that one will go on a 4x PCIe slot then it ll be imported in the patch then sent out to the main output. I think that I won t be able to have a preview in my monitor but I can live with that.
Yes generally the idea is to use TH2Go and not th edual head, that makes totally sense,
I got myself a TH2Go Analog edition, could you tell me more about the 20px x shift? I also noticed some weirdness but never really figured out…
tx
Simone
@io - haha. take it easy on the kimchi to start with!
in terms of SLI…
if you just put both cards into the PC
then they run like 2 separate cards
if you want SLI then you attach the little board between the two cards (unnecessary on some more modern cards?)
and turn SLI on
this makes them act like 1 combined card
so although generally the motherboards you want are designed for SLI (to have the right slots). you’re not actually using the SLI feature.
i get the whole output shifted by an arbitrary number of pixels sometimes (with analog on Matrox’s)
it’s sometimes consistent, sometimes not. it generally doesn’t matter except for when you’re doing mapping work
you can hard avoid it by using DVi, or with VGA fiddle with reconnecting a few times until the problem disappears / goes back to the offset you had in the first place
in response to my previous question about 3 outputs on NVidia:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=169320
answer’s no, only 2 are ever active (except for on 1 card which has 2 GPUs)
i’ve managed getting a span of 3 displays out of the 3 DVI ports on a geforce 595 using win7 and nvidias 2D surround software. couldn’t then use 3 x th2gs out of those 3 ports sadly
long cables?
tried some EDID-minder in between?
i don’t think that this is an ATI-issue.
Beware of the dreaded “mising pins” vga cable, once really that gave me an headache, a a long vga cable with 2 or 3 pins missig, those transport the EDID and with the analog edition they are mandatory.
S.
it was on fairly long VGA’s to XGA projectors
no issue on the GeForce cards against the same cables / from same location.
although it may theoretically be true that both should work equally, it’s empirically worrisome
sugokukimchi ;)
@xdnitro : any idea if it’s possible to get a double NVidia surround setup? (6 heads)
or 3 on a surround + 1,2 on another card?
or can you access all 3 DVi’s without surround mode (acts as separate devices)?
@sugo - no idea on running two 595s in a machine. I’d expect you’d get 6 heads maybe but not as a single span… you talking single span? that def won’t happen.
I had the 3 wide span on windows 7 and had another GPU as the primary display. All working fine - stable. Didn’t try 1 and 2 on another card but I couldn’t see a problem with it.
and yeah - from what I remember all 3 DVIs could act as separate devices no problem.
I don’t have the card anymore - just brough it to see if I could get 3 x 3TH2Gs from it as single span in windows 7. couldn’t and returned to supplier. For me cards are generally worthless if you can’t get 6 screen span out of them. My card of choice is the 3GB 580 right now. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on an eyeFinity setup though and getting 12 screen span out of it in win7. performance testing would be interesting.
Hi
I was foolishly expecting somebody to tell me the one and only truth but ended up with a lot of possible solution… now it is time to take a decision.
I was following sugoku s Eyefinity thread and although it seems promising it seems to be pretty much into the limbo for the moment, and I do need a sure set up. I don t have time or resources to deal with.
I remember that my needs are as following:
The best (as stable/sure) is to get a good card (gtx560) for the projectors and another cheaper card for patching.
I d love to receive the last advice, ideas…
S.