Hardware For Sale/Trade

The Scalable Graphics Compositor (SGC) can recieve 2 or 4 DVI digital video inputs and combine them into a single video output with increased performance. Input is provided by 2 or 4 InfinitePerformance graphics pipelines (in V-Brick) that render only a part of the full screen.

Raion-Fox wrote: So yes this conbines 2-4 VPro inputs and makes a 2-4kimage out of it.

jan-jaap wrote:

Raion-Fox wrote: So yes this conbines 2-4 VPro inputs and makes a 2-4kimage out of it.

Nope, the output is a single link DVI so still limited to 1920x1200

IIRC it interleaves the pipes so you can get 4x the frame rate. Or maintain framerate with a more complex scene.

spiroyster wrote: Can it AA the final output, rather than splitting the workload, or increasing the complexity?

The scalable graphics compositor is a hardware graphics compositor that is capable of
receiving two or four DVI digital video inputs, and then combining them into a single
video output to increase graphics performance. Each input is from one SGI
InfinitePerformance graphics pipe (VPro V12 board) residing in a V-brick. The video
output can display on digital and analog monitors at the same time.

Raion-Fox wrote: There's an IBM monitor that can do it, forget the name but Hamek uses one.

I misunderstood the purpose of the compositor, my bad.

jan-jaap wrote: From the SGI™ InfinitePerformance™: Scalable Graphics Compositor User’s Guide

Pixel Average
: This selection combines the inputs from the InfinitePerformance
pipes connected to the compositor and displays an average of those inputs.
(This selection works only if you have inputs from four InfinitePerformance
pipes.) This selection can be used for anti-aliasing (smoothing out of jagged
edges on items on a display)

gijoe77 wrote: lets pretend someone bought this thing - what can one currently run/do with this thing? Any software that already exists or would someone have to code their own stuff to use this? I'm still confused...

spiroyster wrote:

gijoe77 wrote: lets pretend someone bought this thing - what can one currently run/do with this thing? Any software that already exists or would someone have to code their own stuff to use this? I'm still confused...

Both, manual says there is a utility that allows you to customise the output of all the graphics pipes (user configurable tiling) as the user desires, or this could be done on an application basis since there appear to be some specific extensions for this hardware, so the developer could choose how they wish to output (which gfx device), multi-contexts all with complex geometry in a system operating in a non-distributed way (in terms of CPU and mem, I'm unsure if the vram can be shared between the different graphics pipes, or it must be replicated for each pipe?). Certainly, it is a novelty item, and you need something in the big-iron class (iirc the ATi's in the Onyx4 support this thing as well) pushing the pixels, but in terms of 'graphics related hardware', its pretty cool imo, while specialised. I don't I know of another breakout box which can perform this as a seperate part of the pipeline other than provided by the gfx, other systems rely on multi GPUs on the same board (or same discrete graphics subsystem) and then perform the mixing as part of its pipeline before outputting through the primary display. e.g Quantum3D AAlchemy.

The AA capability is neat, and the 'tiling' interesting. I don't think the AA would require a special code path for the GL program, since it can interleave all the inputs (which would duplicate all the geometry/texture memory, and jitter each output) for multiple pipes and mix at a hardware-level. Normally this would have to be done by rendering 4 frames (using the same gfx pipe) and then compositing via the accumulation buffer, or (if the pipes' texture buffer can handle it) rendering an image 4x the size and relying on the bilinear filtering when drawing to a downsized quad (not so easy on sgi's tbh).

@vishnu
This item is certainly applicable outside of broadcasting too since it can be used for higher-bandwidth visualisations and perhaps simulations which would make use of multi-context rendering. I think (I have seen) there are dedicated boxes with stuff like BNC ports and wotnot for the dedicated broadcast equivalent.... DMedia Pro breakout box which has a pretty similar livery. ???

gijoe77 wrote: I suppose the TMDS version for IR3/IR4 graphics serves the same purpose.

gijoe77 wrote: One needs a Onyx4 with ATI's graphics to use this? Not VPro or earlier Onyxs (I don't see any DVI output on the IR4 pics listed in the other thread)? I'm not aware of any Autodesk software working on the Onyx4/ATI platform... I was under the impression nothing really works on the Onyx4...