Triple Monitor and Triple Graphic cards

[IckyATLAS]

Many years ago when I was more involved with CGI systems, (I developed a 3D simulator for flexible robotic assembly cells), one way to have high performance for flight simulators was to have separate graphical channels one per screen. Companies at that time that were selling horrendously expensive graphic hardware was the like Megatek (I worked on those at 150'000 US$ per set), Evans Sutherland etc. The difference between those systems and the hardware available to the general public on PC's and Macs was enormous, the price difference too.

Since then mainstream systems have caught up  and graphic boards  in terms of raw performance are now similar to professional ones (I except here dedicated custom military solutions). We got SLI from Nvidia that came in Double, Triple, or Quad SLI. But here the implementation is to combine up to four graphic card on one unique same display.

 

Those who wanted double or triple monitor solution still had to split the screen real estate over three monitors. And these were fed from one channel backed by one, two, three or four graphic boards.

Nowadays SLI is not supported on RTX2080Ti high end boards, and so that type of power increase does not exist anymore. Let also say that I practiced with double SLI implementation with the previous IL2 games like Pacific Fighters 10 years ago and the scalability was not ideal. Four boards brought no increase compared with three, and three was slightly better than two. Two was about between 30 to 50 percent better than one, and there were many many graphical glitches. Smoke had many problems and sometimes, objects were flashing in the image etc. I never could make it work perfectly with no problems. Many other games just did not work at all.

 

Has anyone tried or knows about an implementation of IL2 with a multi-channel graphical solution. Is that even possible?.

 

I mean by that that you may have say three Nvidia(whatever the model) boards each in one PCI Express slot and each monitor is tied to one board separately. No SLI here each board is indipendent. Then IL2 should feed the graphics data for each monitor to the corresponding graphics board.

That would be the easiest and cheapest way to have a triple 4K monitor solution with the same framerate and performance as if it was only one. You have in this case absolute perfect scalability.

There is no gain from the CPU performance side but the data sent to the graphic board is sent to the corresponding board according to which monitor image it belongs to. You have indeed a large image split in three but with the pixels processed separately by the corresponding board. If the combined 3x4k monitor real estate is 11520 x 2160, probably the CPU may be impacted but not to the same extent I suppose.

 

This would be an interesting solution for cheaper boards because you could have with three boards much more power than with one high end board and for an only slightly higher price.

 

 

 

Edited November 24, 2019 by IckyATLAS

[ZachariasX]

36 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

This would be an interesting solution for cheaper boards because you could have with three boards much more power than with one high end board and for an only slightly higher price.

I doubt that with todays setups this would make sense.

 

Intels bread and butter gaming boxes run on Socket1151. There you have only 16 PCIe lanes in addition to the four attaching the whole rest of your system to the CPU via QPI.

 

If you have two GPUs, then you‘d run 8x PCIe. Tripple setup would be 8x, 4x, 4x. By that point, I/O to the VRAM is in total down to a quarter. Hardly highend.

 

For tripple setups you‘d need 4 + 16 +16 + 16 = 52 PCIe lanes from the CPU. You‘d need a Zen2 Threadripper CPU. Or obscenely priced (slower) Intel CPUs also on very, very expensive boards.

 

Hence, I see multi GPU as essentially a non viable solution, unless for special cases like you had to do your work. Else, it is financially not viable.