Conneting two PC's?

"make them work as one" = wtf does that mean?

Do you want them just connected on the same network or are you thinking that it is possible to have them effective split CPU/GPU load? (the later really isn't possible unless you have a blade server or something similar)
 
J-Mag said:
or are you thinking that it is possible to have them effective split CPU/GPU load? (the later really isn't possible unless you have a blade server or something similar)
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Yes!

I asked this question because I remember -sometime ago- one of my friends did something like this via local network to play a game. I didn't have any idea what he awas doing at that time (not now either).
 
If a game needs more processing power than one computer has, then trying to run it on two over a network will only hurt performance.
 
You can't split games among two comps. It only works for a very few things. Did he just play a game remotely on the other comp or something?
 
just connect the motherboards together using an IDE cable.







(don't listen to me.....)
 
444 said:
Did he just play a game remotely on the other comp or something?
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What he told me was that he was going to use 3-4 computers over LAN "because one computer cannot handle the game". I am sure more than one person played the game.

BTW: I have no contact with this guy now. He is not in this country anymore (he works for Intel somewhere on earth). That's why I posted this here.
 
vsrdan said:
What he told me was that he was going to use 3-4 computers over LAN "because one computer cannot handle the game". I am sure more than one person played the game.

BTW: I have no contact with this guy now. He is not in this country anymore (he works for Intel somewhere on earth). That's why I posted this here.
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Well there are a couple possibilities here. 1. he had no idea what he was talking about. 2. he was just bullshitting you. How long ago was this? What kind of hardware are we talking about and what kind of game?

Like I said earlier, adding a network connection into the equation will make things slower. In the time it takes for the master computer to send a request to the slave, the slave computing the request, and the slave sending the response, the data will be quite old and useless. If the master computer waits for the data then it will slow down significantly. The type of processing required in games is simply not conducive to distributed processing. Not to mention the game would have to be specifically coded to take advantage of this, and any parallel/distributed code is a pretty substantial undertaking.

The only game I know of that kinda does something along these lines is doom. You could connect multiple machines together for a multihead display. However, this is nothing more than just running three machines in a multiplayer game, each running their own instance of the game. The only communication between the machines is the typical position/state data. There is no computational data being exchanged, so I suppose it really has nothing to do with the topic of this thread at all. :)
 
It is possible to create computing clusters, but only works in certain scenarios and definitely not for gaming. For mass non-real-time rendering, it works great. That's why we have render farms, although computers aren't really being "combined" here, they're simply splitting up the workload.
 
jpmkm said:
Well there are a couple possibilities here. 1. he had no idea what he was talking about. 2. he was just bullshitting you. How long ago was this? What kind of hardware are we talking about and what kind of game?
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He was very good at what he was doing, may be I didn't understand it. This happened about 2 years ago. he was "connecting" -I think- 3 computers (two Pentium 4s and one Athlon XP). I am sure he was installing somehting in each computer (may be the game).

Yes, may be he was arranging a multi-player game.
 
PWMK2 said:
It is possible to create computing clusters, but only works in certain scenarios and definitely not for gaming. For mass non-real-time rendering, it works great. That's why we have render farms, although computers aren't really being "combined" here, they're simply splitting up the workload.
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This is what I thought he was actually doing.
 
vsrdan said:
This is what I thought he was actually doing.
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Well, then he wasn't gaming, then. You can't do a render farm for video games. You'd get like 1 FPS if even that and there isn't any software to allow you to do so.
 
It may have been an experiment in grid computing, however as said earlier it would be useless for playing games.
 
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