Multiple Board Installation; Simultaneous Image Capture From Different Boards - Matrox Morphis QxT Installation And Hardware Reference

28 Chapter 3: Using multiple Matrox Morphis QxT boards
Installing multiple
PCIe boards

Multiple board installation

This section describes how to use multiple Matrox Morphis QxT boards.
Install each additional Matrox Morphis QxT board as you installed the first board
(refer to Chapter 2: Hardware installation).
When installing Matrox Morphis QxT, you can theoretically have as many as 16
boards installed in your computer at one time. This number is, however, limited
by the number of empty slots in your computer and, for simultaneous image
capture, by the available bandwidth of your computer (discussed later in this
chapter).
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() in the
MIL Reference.
Simultaneous image capture from different
boards
You can simultaneously capture images from video sources attached to Matrox
Morphis QxT; however, the number of video sources from which you can
simultaneously capture images is determined by the available bandwidth of your
PCIe interface (segment). If there is not enough bandwidth, your board will drop
frames.
Matrox Morphis QxT might have a problem with dropped frames if there are not
at least 4 active lanes on the PCIe connector to the Host (for example, if the board
is connected to a x4 PCIe connector that has only one active lane). Customers
have to verify with the motherboard manufacturer to find out whether the
particular motherboard works efficiently with a x4 PCIe board, such as Matrox
Morphis QxT.
The use of a high-performance PCIe core-logic chipset is necessary to sustain PCIe
transfers to Host memory. If a high performance chipset is used, you should not
have a problem with dropped frames.