Installation Of Multiple Boards; Simultaneous Image Capture From Different Boards - Matrox Rapixo CXP Installation And Hardware Reference

32 Chapter 3: Using multiple Matrox Rapixo CXP boards

Installation of multiple boards

You can install and use multiple Matrox Rapixo CXP boards in one computer.
Install each additional Matrox Rapixo CXP board the same way you installed the
first board (refer to Chapter 2: Hardware installation). The number of Matrox
Rapixo CXP 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_RAPIXOCXP in the MIL Reference.
Simultaneous image capture from different
boards
In addition to capturing images from multiple video sources with a single Matrox
Rapixo CXP board, you can also simultaneously capture images from video sources
attached to multiple Matrox Rapixo CXP 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, a PCIe 3.x chipset should be used. A PCIe 3.x 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 CXP 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 CXP board, you can use the Matrox Rapixo CXP Bench
tool accessible using 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.