2 Video Card Setup - But NO SLI

[zoltron_rulez]

All,

 

Correct me if I am wrong:

 

I know SLI does nothing for X-Plane and as Austin pointed it out, it can make it worse but ...

What if you have 2 video cards in your system (and you are NOT running SLI)?

 

If I go back to my writing video games in OpenGL and DirectX days, the common thing to do was to create a single Direct 3d device and run game loop on it. This means, that if I want to run X-Plane on 2 video cards w/out SLI I need to run 2 -instances of X-Plane <- and that would not work since both would run separately of each other). If that's the case, there's no point of doing this.

Therefore, in a nutshell, X-Plane runs on a single video card (for its rendering, I don't care about the instruments).

 

Any comments are welcome to add to this discussion ...

 

Not to far related, it would be great if X-Plane would support multiple rendering devices in some sort of fashion. Have a look at this OpenGL rendering of multi-million simulator by CAE:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sLNApTc38w

 

lk

Edited April 24, 2015 by zoltron_rulez

[Ben Russell]

1. It was Ben Supnik, not Austin, that wrote about SLI.

 

2. Your post is a mess of punctuation and side tracked conversation.

 

3. When running multiple copies of X-Plane system bus bandwidth becomes a problem. You may have 10 graphics cards but you only have 1 way to get all the data to them.

Edited April 24, 2015 by Ben Russell

[zoltron_rulez]

1) True. I got the names mixed up

2) LOL, true, had a long week of coding at work trying to keep up w/ dead lines,- doesn't help that I wrote this later towards the evening just before bed. I should of organized it into a few concise questions w/ out side tracking,- and then wait for the response and filter out the answers that I already know.

3) That makes sense but it depends what you mean by it, can you elaborate?

My understanding is when you launch a single copy of X-Plane, the rendering output (the scenery geometry and game physics, ie. the game loop) only supports a single video card.

How can you feed data (I guess I have no idea what you mean by data???? This could mean anything such as data coming in through plugin, etc, etc.) to 10 different cards (independent card setup, non-SLI/cross fire) if X-Plane only renders to a single logical direct 3d device? I am puzzled what you mean?

 

Just to point out: I know that there's a difference between a single PC setup w/ multiple cards and a multi-card rendering system setup that commercial applications such as a commercial flight sim would use. I just care about the former, and don't care about the latter .

Edited April 24, 2015 by zoltron_rulez