Elite: Dangerous PvE - Mobius

Yep, I've been at it again looking up one thing and stumbling across another but this may be of interest to anyone with a laptop that has an under performing GPU.

I can say no more. I know too little about this sort of technology to comment.

http://youtube.com/v/bP_8EYQ-2RA

It's not a new concept. If you do a "external graphics card for laptop" search, you get quite a few hits. Definitely a solution for some. But in my opinion a bit quirky.

GlobusDiablo wrote:It's not a new concept. If you do a "external graphics card for laptop" search, you get quite a few hits. Definitely a solution for some. But in my opinion a bit quirky.

Yeah I did think this must have been thought of before but you never know. I've never had a laptop (or dance) so I wan't sure if this was something new or not as I often hear about most laptops being stuck with what they're installed with and that being a problem for people who can't afford a new laptop but want to play better games.

This is an old subject. Please mods remove this thread if it's cluttering up the forum.

This was something I was excited about Thunderbolt for, unfortunately it's almost non-existant on non-Macs due to licensing and hardware costs. Was better off back when it was Lightpeak before Apple messed with it, but oh well.

Basically Thunderbolt is PCIx over cable. So you could plug in USB to it, Firewire or even actual PCIx cards like graphics cards. It was slower than internal cards of course, but not by too much (Especially version 2). There were actually manufacturers that made GPU boxes that had Thunderbolt ports you could plug into your Macbook. They were pretty damned expensive though.

Still an interesting idea, and one that was elegant rather than hacky. I would still like to see it develop more, but I fear that ship has sailed with USB 3.0 getting such widespread adoption.

ZATZAi wrote:This was something I was excited about Thunderbolt for, unfortunately it's almost non-existant on non-Macs due to licensing and hardware costs. Was better off back when it was Lightpeak before Apple messed with it, but oh well.

Basically Thunderbolt is PCIx over cable. So you could plug in USB to it, Firewire or even actual PCIx cards like graphics cards. It was slower than internal cards of course, but not by too much (Especially version 2). There were actually manufacturers that made GPU boxes that had Thunderbolt ports you could plug into your Macbook. They were pretty damned expensive though.

Still an interesting idea, and one that was elegant rather than hacky. I would still like to see it develop more, but I fear that ship has sailed with USB 3.0 getting such widespread adoption.

Is Thunderbolt like a souped up Firewire? I remember seeing Audio recording interfaces that used firewire before USB took over. They seemed to be better (faster, less latency) from what I've read

Avago-Earo wrote:Is Thunderbolt like a souped up Firewire? I remember seeing Audio recording interfaces that used firewire before USB took over. They seemed to be better (faster, less latency) from what I've read

It's got more in common with eSATA, in that it extends the internal communication interface normally only available on your motherboard outside the system. SATA is the cables you use to connect your HDD to your MOBO, eSATA is SATA cables that go outside your case, any HDD you plug into will run at full speed as if it were inside your case. Thunderbolt is similar for PCIx (Though it's not literally that, it's very close to that). PCIx is what your graphics cards, sound cards and the like use to communicate, and thus Thunderbolt has very little overhead and runs much faster than USB or Firewire as it talks directly the same language GPUs already expect.

USB and Firewire both have to go through chips that then get sent to the PCI bus and there is more overhead because of it. Firewire still has lower latency than even USB 3 (And USB 2 is low latency than USB 3 in some cases as well), but USB 3 is faster than Firewire by a good amount. Only PCIx and Thunderbolt are faster than USB 3.

This explanation is of course simplified.