Crossfire Eyefinity = shared framebuffer?

[cadaveca]

Ok, I can see I'm wasting my time chatting with you Steevo...basic update that WDDM 1.1 brings.


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-graphics-desktop-multicore-cpu,7643.html

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx

Read away. You are obviously not a programmer, or you'd already be aware of these changes.

The performance challenge happens because the design of GDI in Windows Vista allows only a single application to hold a system-wide exclusive global lock.

The solution to the problem was therefore to reduce the lock contention and improve concurrency by re-architecting the internal synchronization mechanism through which multiple applications can reliably render at the same time. Contention due to the global exclusive lock is avoided by implementing a number of fine-grained locks which are not exclusive but aid parallelism. The increased number of fine-grained locks adds a small overhead for scenarios where only a single application is rendering at a time.

So, to shorten your reseach, Vista only allows for single graphics threads to access the hardware at once. Win7, and WDDM 1.1, allow for concurrent graphics threads, meaning you can even schedule these threads to different ASICs, and have them do different work...with multiple monitors, you could play two games at once...or use two seperate graphics drivers at the same time. this means that you could have the second vga render the offset FOV for the tertiary monitors, and for apps that don't support it, you could just run seperate instances of the app...like they did with the 24-display Eyefinity demo...4 concurrent threads, each using 6 monitors.

I CAN prove that this is how it is...common knowledge, in fact.

Support multiple drivers in a multi-adapter, multi-monitor setup

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model


So now, you were saying? You have no proof? But I do? Wha?


I know I don't post often...but watch yourself with me, please. There's no need for an argument here...just a nice discussion, please. No need to thank me for enlightening you. And if I was wrong, I have no issues with that either...sharing knowledge is how we grow and learn...and for someone to be right, someone MUST be wrong. I apologize for my snarky tone here, but you've barked up the wrong tree here, and have offended me with your comments.

So, to summerize, AMD is lying about something here in thier infos about Eyefinity and Crossfire. Eyefinity working with 5970 means Eyefinity will work with ANY crossfire set-up...In vista, it requires all monitors to be on the primary display device, but in Win7, the monitors could be plugged into any display device.

So, for AMd to take the tact that they need to work on each Crossfire config seperately...just doesn't make sense. If they are all using the PCI-E interface, it's just a small bit of work to deal with the slight bit of latency going from slot to slot, in comparison to going through the PLX chip.

So why do they say it's different, and it was easiest to get 5970 going first?? My first thought was sideport...bolstered, like I said earlier, by the 384-bit rumours.