Have you ever seen those oil and natural gas exploration visual systems? They are nothing short of amazing. It's all done with VR now. I saw a brief documentary on it on Discovery or something.
Yeah actually I've worked on a few projects for those systems impressive, and 'money's no object is the theme'. We play around with geomatic software packages for the wire/fibre stuff here at work, but I don't do that work anymore, that was a few years back when I did more network design.
I have 2 friends who work here the patch (well the HQ for the patch) and everytime they get new computers they invite me over and say "Is this good? How good is it? What does it cost in 'REAL money'?" what do you think of this? Dual Xeon / Quadro based multi-monitor desktops, and upgraded almost every year (probably an 18-24 month contract or something). Ahh to be owned by an Oil company. 8)
Edit an from the other post (a reply in general not directed at you as I'm sure you know this);
From a purely hardware standpoint, this system would be able to do games just as well if not better. In most cases, Quadro chips and boards are nearly identical to gaming cards. The discriminating factor is those pesky Quadro drivers that you have to use.
Yeah and sometimes they have features that are more important to certain functions than to gaming, like in this case the GENLOCK allows you to synch video which uses the slight cadence difference of NTSC and output a correct signal for broadcasting, which allows you to edit stuff on the fly witout there appearing to be a frame skip, etc, which is a slightly tough task, but not even remotely useful for gaming. Also processing effects realtime is extremely hard, and in this case you want something that can do it without the input of the CPU or HD, on the fly stuff like this is hard because there is no real pre-instruction or optimization because it's all NEW live imput/output.
Sure the hardware would be great for gaming, but in order to optimize it and get it to work, likely not worth the effort. I would need to look at the specs, but for durability/reliability I wouldn't be surprsed if these things are much slower than a GF7900GT and thuys likely 4 of them would be slower than 2 GX2s, and I doubt you'd even get much worthwhile imporvement in gaming in SLi beyond that 4th card,, probaly the 5,6,7,8th cards would add maybe 7,5,3,1% imporvement respectively if that.