26 Chapter 3: Using multiple Matrox RadientPro CL boards
Installation of multiple boards
You can install and use multiple Matrox RadientPro CL boards in one computer.
Install each additional Matrox RadientPro CL board as you installed the first board
(refer to
Chapter 2: Hardware installation
). The number of Matrox RadientPro
CL 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 PCI
devices can be mapped to the PCI 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_RADIENTPRO
in the MIL Reference.
Simultaneous image capture from different
boards
You can simultaneously capture images from video sources attached to different
Matrox RadientPro CL boards. However, the number of video sources from which
you can simultaneously capture images is computer-dependent.
The use of a high performance PCIe chipset is necessary to sustain PCIe transfers
to Host memory. Ideally, a PCIe 2.x chipset should be used. A PCIe 2.x Host bus
with 8 active lanes will optimize the speed of data transmission, and will minimize
data loss. The list of platforms that are known to be compatible with Matrox
RadientPro CL are available on the Matrox web site, under the board’s
compatibility list.
To measure the effective, available bandwidth of the PCIe interface used by your
Matrox RadientPro CL board, you can use the RadientBench 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.
