Random rant: nVIDIA SLI in a different way

Oh well, I’m not even sure on how this work but anyway, have you ever looked at 3d glasses?
I had those with an old ELSA NV15 video card.

They sutter the image between the two eyes. A bad thing about this is that they cut the framerate in half. I also guess they need software support or at least the stereoscopic driver nvidia is distributing.

Now that SLI is here, I could really have two imputs for the shutter glasses. One for each eye which comes from different video cards.

Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not so useful, but I had this strange idea and I wanted to collect some opinions on it.

With “cuts the framerate in half” you mean because of the rendering power necessary or becuase of the shutter glasses?

The NVIDIA Quadro boards with two monitor outlets and quadbuffered stereo support can already drive two monitors, one displaying the left eye, the other the right eye.
This can be used for passive stereo solutions, beamers and polarized glasses.
You just need to enable dual monitor clone-mode and switch some option on the stereo page in NVIDIA’s control panel. Sweet.

check the nvidia developper webpage

Originally posted by Relic:
With “cuts the framerate in half” you mean because of the rendering power necessary or becuase of the shutter glasses?
Oh sorry, I really wanted to mean refresh rate in half.
On my manual, they written a monitor refresh gone to left screen, the other to the right.
They written this is needed because of shutter glasses (indipendently from frame period) and it does make sense after all.

Originally posted by Relic:
The NVIDIA Quadro boards with two monitor outlets and quadbuffered stereo support can already drive two monitors, one displaying the left eye, the other the right eye.
I knew this and surely it would kill performance. With two processors in SLI it would still go at full speed, and possibly with less interactions between the two cards (I don’t know how SLI works, but it doesn’t seem too easy to me).
It would also need special glasses with two inputs anyway…

Originally posted by Relic:
You just need to enable dual monitor clone-mode and switch some option on the stereo page in NVIDIA’s control panel. Sweet.
I didn’t know that, but I fear it’s Quadro only.

EDIT: wrong UBB code.