Matrox Rapixo CL Pro, Installation And Hardware Reference, Page: 30 / 96

30 Chapter 3: Using multiple Matrox Rapixo CL Pro boards
Installation of multiple boards
You can install and use multiple Matrox Rapixo CL Pro boards in one computer.
Install each additional Matrox Rapixo CL Pro board as you installed the first board
(refer to
Chapter 2: Hardware installation ). The number of Matrox Rapixo CL Pro
boards that you can install is primarily dependent on the number of physical slots
in your computer, and your BIOS; your BIOS establishes how many PCIe devices
can be mapped to the PCIe memory space of your computer.
Using MIL-Lite, you have to allocate a MIL system for each board and allocate
the resources of each MIL system. For more information, see
MsysAlloc() with
M_SYSTEM_RAPIXOCL in the MIL Reference.
Simultaneous image capture from different
boards
In addition to capturing images from multiple video sources with a single
Matrox Rapixo CL Pro board, you can also simultaneously capture images from
video sources attached to multiple Matrox Rapixo CL Pro boards. Note that the
number of video sources from which you can simultaneously capture images is
limited by the PCIe chipset on your computer.
The use of a high performance PCIe chipset is necessary to sustain PCIe transfers
to Host memory. Ideally, at least a PCIe 2.x chipset (or more recent) should be
used. A PCIe 2.x or more recent Host bus will optimize the speed of data
transmission, and will minimize data loss. The list of platforms that are known to
be compatible with Matrox Rapixo CL Pro is available on the Matrox web site,
under the board’s compatibility list.
To measure the effective available bandwidth of the PCIe slot in your computer
with the Matrox Rapixo CL Pro board, you can use the Rapixo CL Bench tool
integrated in the MILConfig utility. As a reference point, capturing from a 2K x
2K, 8-bit, 60 frames/sec video source will require a minimum bandwidth of
240 Mbytes/sec, plus an additional bandwidth margin of approximately 20%, for
a bandwidth of 288 Mbytes/sec.