X-Plane 9 supports multiple monitors... how about multiple video cards?

[thermodynamic]

I have a 2009 Mac Pro w/ a single ATi 4870 video card. If I were to purchase a second 4870, would X-Plane 9 use both video cards and to their full rendering potential?

Thx much!

 

[Cromulent]

I have a 2009 Mac Pro w/ a single ATi 4870 video card. If I were to purchase a second 4870, would X-Plane 9 use both video cards and to their full rendering potential?

Thx much!

No. Mac OS X does not support SLI or Crossfire.

 

[thermodynamic]

No. Mac OS X does not support SLI or Crossfire.

Thanks for the info! I asked at the Apple store and he said the game would work with two cards.

 

[voyagerd]

Thanks for the info! I asked at the Apple store and he said the game would work with two cards.

It will work, it just wont use both.

 

[Cromulent]

Interestingly enough I've just been reading through the Apple developer documentation for other reasons and I can across an article discussing this very issue. From what I can tell it should be possible to use 2 graphics cards to render images but it would need to be alternative frames, this would though still increase performance as the cards could queue the next frame up while the other card is displaying its image. It might require some interesting code to get the image from the offline card to the online card though.

Anyway back to the topic in hand, I very much doubt that X-Plane would take advantage of this anyway but it might be interesting to play around with it from an academic perspective.

For those interested:

https://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2008/tn2229.html

 

[thermodynamic]

Interestingly enough I've just been reading through the Apple developer documentation for other reasons and I can across an article discussing this very issue. From what I can tell it should be possible to use 2 graphics cards to render images but it would need to be alternative frames, this would though still increase performance as the cards could queue the next frame up while the other card is displaying its image. It might require some interesting code to get the image from the offline card to the online card though.

Anyway back to the topic in hand, I very much doubt that X-Plane would take advantage of this anyway but it might be interesting to play around with it from an academic perspective.

For those interested:

https://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2008/tn2229.html

Fantastic find, thank you kindly!!

(though having just played X-Plane 9, it feels much faster, and with more visual detail, than Flight Simulator X w/SP2 (DX10-enabled) on the following hardware:

* Vista ultimate
* Asus P5Q mobo
* 8GB RAM (DDR2-800 @ 4-4-3-10 CL)
* Intel Q9650 at 3.6GHz (9x400MHz FSB)
* Sount blaster Fatal1ty titanium
* Intel GTX260 (o/c to match GTX280 speeds)

My Mac Pro:
* 8GB (DDR3-1066, CL rating unknown, 4x2GB modules)
* 2.66GHz CPU (Nehalem)
* ATi 4870 video (512MB DDR5)

 

[dimme]

Fantastic find, thank you kindly!!

(though having just played X-Plane 9, it feels much faster, and with more visual detail, than Flight Simulator X w/SP2 (DX10-enabled)

I know Flight Simulator X w/SP2 works much better with direct x 9. They never really got 10 going. I have the opposite results with my Mac Pro. X-plane runs slower and with less visual detail in OS X. As compared with MS FSX under Windows 7 64bit. I was told my Nivida video card drivers for OS X are the problem.