Thoughts: mine and yours
So what's the end result? I've got a single workstation that I can use to evaluate graphics hardware from the top two IHVs, in essence. The way the operating system and drivers work mean that any sensibly coded application will give me a choice of hardware to run it on, and I can run my tools on either GPU, both outputting to a common display. That was the end game in the experiment and it works well enough that I'll keep the arrangement for the forseeable future. I actually ended up repeating the testing on this workstation just to double check before we went live; you'll notice that an Athlon 64 4000+ PC was used to bring you the results, because they were fine.That's not to say it'll replace any properly prepared test system for anything critical, but for quickly doing work that isn't performance critical, across the IHVs on their latest architectures, it works for me.
My only wish is that I had three or four identical monitors to use the setup with, rather than just the two I have, which are two different ones at that. I can always find a way to use more desktop space, so the more pixels the better, which is why I run two heads on my workstation anyway. If only smaller-than-20-inch LCDs had more vertical pixel resolution, giving me at least 1080p in that dimension, I'd probably try and pick up four of whatever they happened to be.
So a neat experiment that turned out really well overall, despite some obvious downsides due to the monitor count that's available. I'm currently using the XL's display space to house a bunch of monitoring applications, information and monitoring tools, and neat stuff like my HEXUS RSS Feed Widget for Konfabulator, when I don't have to use it for anything else testing wise.
To sum up, running dual graphics boards doesn't mean they have to have the same GPU. It doesn't even mean they have to be from the same IHV. Quite a niche setup for a PC I must admit, but for the kind of work I do it's pretty invaluable at times and I'm glad it works. Just thought I'd share with a little article linked to from HEXUS.blogz. Let me know in the thread what you think. Enough upsides for you to ponder doing it yourself? Games developers would make good use of it I imagine. Share your thoughts, I'm keen to hear them.
