Apple 30" Cinema Display
- Thread starter Piyono
- Start date
Adcadet
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Matrox Parhelia's perhaps?
Buck
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That sounds like something they would use at Pixar Animation.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Last time I heard about Pixar was when they announced that they had decided to only use Xeon-based workstations. Pretty hilarious from a company owned by Steve Jobs.Buck said:
Buck
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CougTek said:
No kidding. I had assumed that they would use everything Mac. I had a G4 open the other day, nicely organized machine. Panther is pretty decent too. Something that just clicked the other day, is that now, when OSX burps, you could easily end up at a command prompt. An interesting issue that could arise with Panther during bootup is found here.
I'm seriously interested in putting 3 of these on some workstations I'm building. Does anyone have information on getting it to run on PCs? If they just use the dual-link DVI, than the Matrox cards should work...no?
Buck
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ddrueding said:
I haven't tried that. I could give you reasons why it shouldn't work, but it would be fun to try. Let us know how it goes.
Pradeep
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Given that it is an Apple product, it will prob have some farked proprietary connection to the vid card, a la ADC connector etc.
sechs
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Apple's gone all open... PCI, IDE, IEE1394, USB....
Pradeep
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After having a read in the arstechnica forums it appears that the 30" has a cable dongle that ends in a normal DVI port. I guess you just need a vid card capable of that resolution. Not that gaming would be anything but a slug at that rez.
ddrueding said:
Any of the Matrox dual-head P-series (P-650, P-750, or Parhelia models) would possibly work, unless this monitor requires an oddball resolution -- which is entirely possible. In any case, you'll need a monitor definition file (.INF) before you could guarantee anything.
Matrox was the first to do dual-DVI monitors (2 video cables to one large LCD monitor) about 2 years ago with a large IBM display.
CougTek said:
Buck said:
There are indeed Macs at Pixar doing important things like logos, character designs, cell illustrations, and various still artwork, but they don't do any of the really nasty sweaty work -- THE 3-D ANIMATION RENDERING. That's actually done on HPaq hardware. The reason is that HP has written a *lot* of critical 3-D rendering coding over the past few years for Pixar and this code only runs on X86 Linux. Besides, Jobs has used X86 hardware in the past, as the second version of his old NeXT workstation was X86-based (not Motorola-based).
A similar situation exists over at Lucas Film's Industrial Light And Magic where they use a Linux Athlon server farm for 3-D animation rendering -- undoubtedly being converted over to an Opteron rendering farm.
Dïscfärm
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Adcadet said:
Matrox recently announced a dedicated card (apparently, you MUST have a dedicated card) for the Apple Cinema Display.
- Matrox announces new dual link Parhelia™ DL256 PCI graphics card for 30" Apple Cinema HD Display® under Windows®
New dual link DVI card delivers stunning graphics and text to next-generation digital flat panels with ultra-high resolution support...
...The Matrox Parhelia DL256 PCI graphics card is available at an ESP of US$ 6 9 9
http://www.matrox.com/mga/workstation/video/news/press_rel/2005/parhelia_dl256.cfm
Gilbo
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The issue with this is simply a confusion of the term "Dual Link" which is mostly due to graphics card vendors' inappropriate use of it. A real dual link connector uses a single DVI cable and the normal DVI form-factor. Monitors that require two seperate DVI cables to drive aren't actually dual-link units. The Apple card can actually run two 30" displays off its two connectors --one off of each.
A dual-link interface is required for a DVI connection to support resolutions above 1900*1080 (@ 60 Hz). It's a bandwidth problem. A second 165Mhz TDMS transmitter and pins that aren't used in a Single-link DVI cable are recruited to provide this extra bandwidth in dual-link cables (pictures). The 2cpu dual DVI card thread now lists cards that possess dual-link capable connectors, and how many they possess. You can plug a single-link cable into these, and they'll simply ignore the second TDMS and its pins.
Rarely is Apple hardware less expensive than PC stuff, but at the moment the dual-link card in the Apple store is quite a bit of a bargain. It's much cheaper than the Quadro's or FireGL's the PC world has to settle for.
A dual-link interface is required for a DVI connection to support resolutions above 1900*1080 (@ 60 Hz). It's a bandwidth problem. A second 165Mhz TDMS transmitter and pins that aren't used in a Single-link DVI cable are recruited to provide this extra bandwidth in dual-link cables (pictures). The 2cpu dual DVI card thread now lists cards that possess dual-link capable connectors, and how many they possess. You can plug a single-link cable into these, and they'll simply ignore the second TDMS and its pins.
Rarely is Apple hardware less expensive than PC stuff, but at the moment the dual-link card in the Apple store is quite a bit of a bargain. It's much cheaper than the Quadro's or FireGL's the PC world has to settle for.
Gilbo has it right. I was lusting over one of these for a while now. Any video card with a real dual link DVI can drive this screen which pretty much narrowes it down to some Nvidia quattro cards and maybe some of the Matrox stuff. One of the upper end quattro cards would be my choice as it can drive games at decent resolutions, but probabbly not the apple cinema native though. The cinema 30 according to several unrelated forums does suport lower PC standard resolutions in scaling so you can see your BIOS dos and games in lower rez's.