The Saturn uses a similar architecture of using two VDPs, with one mainly dedicated to rendering the background.
Yes, this is essentially SLI/ CrossFire, something that has been around for some time, and support would be described as patchy at best. I believe the main issue is that it's left to game developers to implement, rather than something abstracted away to the graphics drivers/ GPUs.
Not exactly the same idea, but Forza Motorsport 3 (and I think 4) let you use 3 Xbox 360s to display on multiple monitors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UJ-QbpFFM8
The other hard problem is building the instruction chain (the term is escaping me at the moment) which gets sent to the GPU. This would have to be duplicated on each system.
The most workable solution would be to have one system do nothing but update game state and send it to the other system, which just does rendering. Limit yourself as much as possible to one way communication. Hopefully the game state system would do a lot of GPU compute for physics etc, otherwise its GPU would be idle. Furthermore, there are a lot of single threaded bottlenecks in both game state and render, so you'd lose out in parallelism. (Many modern systems fix this problem by rendering frame N (which is read only on state N) while simultaneously computing game state for frame N+1. (which is also read only on state N) Since both operations are read only, their single thread bottlenecks are different single thread bottlenecks, which helps parallelism dramatically.) Overall you'd be getting a very minor boost in performance from doubling the hardware commitment; certainly no better than 50%, but I'd ballpark probably closer to 25%.
It's an interesting idea, but one which is ultimately destroyed by the unrelenting iron fist of Amdahl's Law.
People would balk at having to buy two consoles for VR though.
But the announcement of the Saturn soon after killed the 32X.
And programming for two VDPs was incredibly difficult. Especially considering games were still being written in assembly even at that point in the industry.
Plus the economics didn't make sense. It is cheaper to manufacture a single console instead of a base system and add-on separately. You end up confusing the consumer, and limiting market reach because your add-on market is a subset of your base unit's market size.
And the games were bad for the most part. Really bad. I have played the majority of home consoles. Even the likes of the 3DO, Jaguar, Virtual Boy, Sega CD, etc. The 32X is easily one of the worst consoles, ever, period.
Really though I feel that the response of any console manufacturer to “hey let’s bring back the 32x” would be “do you know how much money that thing lost Sega”. Just update the specs a bit and sell a “Pro” or “Plus” model for the same cost as the original launch cost, and sell the old design for less.
You can get external FireWire boxes to cram graphics cards in for your computer; my general impression of the market is that “serious gamers” who “need” 120fps are pouring lots of money into Windows machines with pricey graphics cards.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-what-...