VOGONS


First post, by sliderider

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Would it be possible to write a video card emulator that runs on one computer connected to a second computer by ethernet that then accesses the computer running the video card emulator as if it were a real video card? I'm asking because I have these two Nexgen motherboards that are VL-Bus and ISA only and I can't play 3D accelerated games on them, naturally. So would it be possible to do this?

I'm also wondering if you could do something similar with a more modern system running a video card emulator making it possible to use a better "video card" than you would other wise be able to use on the older system like emulating a AGP or PCIe video card for a system with only PCI slots to use. Or even just passing the 3D data straight through ethernet to the video card that is present in the host computer and sending it back to the older system to use.

Reply 1 of 2, by VileR

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Just because of the bandwidth requirements, I don't think ethernet would be anywhere near practical. Plain PCI has a bus speed of 133 MB/sec, not to mention AGP (up to >2 GB/sec) or PCIe-16 (4-16 GB/sec). So even a modern gigabit ethernet NIC doesn't cut it, let alone a network card that would work on those older motherboards.

Then again, these days you're starting to get 100-gigabit ethernet, so who knows. But even if it's practical, interfacing that with a much older system is going to be a problem.

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