Originally posted by: ViRGE
Wouldn't that be a tremendous waste of resources though?
No, quite the opposite actually. Instead of relying on application specific optimizations to attain scaling, every board would be working at 100% efficiency at all times regardless of the application, assuming CPU limitations are not present.
Any 3D game that allows AA (probably 99% of such titles) would automatically scale and provide a benefit over a single card without the need for profiles. And best of all, compatibility would be 100% transparent to the application because scaling would be done at the hardware level.
2x->4x MSAA is not even close to halving the performance of a card in most situations.
That was just one example. You could have two boards @ 4xAA giving 8xAA for the same performance hit as one board @ 4xAA.
Or you could have four boards doing 2xAA and providing 8xAA at the same performance hit as one board doing 2xAA.
Or four boards @ 4xAA could provide 16xAA at the performance level as one board doing 4xAA.
The possibilities are endless.
Better still, super-sampling would become free as every board has to capture one shader/texture sample anyway. Super-sampling has a high cost on single cards so this would be a major bonus.
Four boards could provide 4xSGSS for free as it would cost exactly the same as one board not doing any AA at all. This would provide amazing image quality, especially in modern games that suffer from shader aliasing.