SGI Onyx4 uses up to 34 ATI cards

THE MILITARY AND THE industry that makes ultra fast 3D machines for them does read the INQ.

See here.

Someone close to SGI and not ex-SGI staff like ATI's Dave Orton and Nvidia's Dan Vivoli detailed a few things about Onyx4 systems.

Onyx4 can use any number of ATI cards and four to sixteen cards are commonly seen for simulators. The highest number for such systems appears to be 34 cards and these cards are largely independent from each others.

Users can have multiple chip threads that explicitly render each of the cards. SGI is also shipping software called OpenGL Multipipe - a program that transparently creates a virtual desktop for both OpenGL and X. The same program does load balancing and culling for each card.

We also understand that cards in systems such as terrain generators or flight simulators are being used to get a higher level of FSAA and not to render faster. In these kind of systems you only need 60Hz.

Such systems are OpenGL based and no DirextX9 versions appear to exist so far. DirextX is for games while OpenGL is used for serious systems. And Linux is very widely accepted for such systems. µ