26 Chapter 4: Using multiple Matrox Meteor-II boards
Multiple board installation
This section describes how to use multiple Matrox Meteor-II boards.
Installing multiple
PCI boards
Install each additional Matrox Meteor-II board for PCI as you installed the first
board (refer to Chapter 2). In other words, place each additional board in an empty
slot. Ensure that the installed boards avoid the CPU heat sink.
Theoretically, you can have as many as 16 MatroxMeteor-II PCI 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 grabs, 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.
Grabbing simultaneously from different boards
You can simultaneously grab images from cameras attached to different Matrox
Meteor-II boards; however, the number of cameras from which you can
simultaneously grab is determined by the PCI bandwidth available in your
computer.
PCI bandwidth
requirements
Matrox Meteor-II /Camera Link has a low susceptibility to PCI bus latency due
to 32 Mbytes of video transfer memory. In addition, sustained PCI-transfers to
memory require the use of a high performance PCI core-logic chipset, such as the
Intel 820, 840 or 850. If a high performance chipset is used with a Matrox
Meteor-II board, you should not have any PCI bandwidth problems when
grabbing up to two full-sized color images simultaneously (using two boards).
However, grabbing more than two full-sized color images simultaneously might
result in PCI bandwidth proble ms.
As a reference point, grabbing a 640 x 480, 30 fps color image in real time will
require a PCI bandwidth of 35 Mbytes/sec when transferring in RGBX (32-bit)
mode.