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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Why the DisplayPort outputs? I could understand if the card took an existing video signal and spliced it into the USB-C ports via alt-mode, but just outputting it in a separate socket doesn't seem very useful.

Also, where is the video signal coming from? I assume the card doesn't have a GPU, but I don't see any internal ports either.

Or did the article get it wrong and the DP sockets are really inputs that are then spliced into the USB-C outputs?

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I'm amazed how the report could get it utterly wrong considering it is literally spelled out in the only photo of the device they have. It has also been exactly the same in the previous MSI TB3 add-in card which has exactly the same port layout.

Ah, and the source article https://www.techpowerup.com/309532/msi-first-motherboard-mak... got it right.

Thunderbolt add-in cards have generally had DisplayPort inputs on the back to feed into the thunderbolt ports. It is a hack, but a side-effect of the adapter not having a GPU, and this becomes the most convenient solution (especially as GPUs puts their outputs in a similar location).

I always loved having a cable coming out of the GPU and connecting to another card. There have been many versions of this throughout my use of various expansion cards. This is excluding the SLI type of internal connections.

This made me remember of my first 3d accelerator card, the Diamond Monster 3D. It was exactly like that, a 3D-only card, that took over the 2D signal of your default video card when you activated it by daisy chaining the 2D videocard to the 3D via a short vga cable between both :-) Good times when 640x480x16bpp was enough to make me wow at something like GLQuake

I also remember my AVerMedia TV card had no way to output audio through the computer's speakers, so you'd have to take its audio out and plug it into your microphone input and enable playback of audio in.

I still to this day am not sure how the voodoo 2 actually worked with that analog link.

They used chrome-key, aka green screen. The 2D card would be told to paint an area a solid color, and the Voodoo would overwrite that section.

Pass the system’s usual video signal through the voodoo unmodified when not generating 3D graphics.

Replace the signal entirely with the voodoo’s own signal when generating 3D graphics.

Wait, what's the use case pf "connect monitor to some usb-c/thunderbolt thingy instead of just directly to GPU next to it" ?

You only need one (possibly long) cable to connect your workspace to your PC. This might be useful in cases where the PC is in a different room/far away (when using an optical USB C cable this allows distances of at least 50m), when your monitor is your USB hub or if you're simply a clean desk fetishist.

I have a similar setup, and the use case is that it’s a single USB C swap for my entire workstation setup to go from my work laptop to my gaming PC. Just a convenience thing.

Kinda shame as Displayport optionally (in theory, pretty much never in practice) supports USB over DP cable.

Could just be one DP cable to the GPU without extra fuss, like decade ago...

The photograpgh of the card in the article shows the DisplayPort sockets labeled as _in_ fwiw.

Ah, I see it now. That makes more sense.

USB4 mandates every port have DisplayPort capability. I think it's quite likely indeed DisplayPort input we see here.

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