Hey Jack,
Regarding your questions:
1) You are correct about how the camera determines how the framegrabber reads the images.
2) PCIe x1 should support your camera. You might see some limitations the closer you get to the maximum bandwidth, just as you might with the PCI bus. PCIe x1 should be able to handle 250 MB/s but realistically, you might only get up to 200-220 MB/s. In the same way with PCI, you should be able to do 133 MB/sec, but realistically with all the other stuff going on over the PCI bus, you usually only get 90-100 MB/sec bandwidth (PCI). So depending on what you need to do, you might want to either not use all 250 MB/s on PCIe x1, or up-plug to a x4 slot if you know you will need all 250 MB/s.
3) I think the best way to answer your question about if your PC's CPU speed will be fast enough is to tell you to test it out. You mentioned that you need to do edge detection, so depending on what else is going on at the same time, this could take anywhere from like 0.1 ms to 5 ms. Edge Detection is pretty fast, so it also depends on how many of them you need to do. So think about how fast you are acquiring and calculate the time you have in between each frame to perform your analysis. For example, if you acquire at a rate of 100 fps, then you will have 1/100 = 0.01 secs (or 10 ms) to process each image. Now if you add more processing functions, then your processing time will take longer. Something else to consider is the function you use and whether that function processes the entire image or just an ROI of it. For example the pattern match function, if you have it look at the entire image, then it takes longer than just searching inside a selected area. A great utility to find out how long your PC can process your images is the Vision Assistant. In there if you go to Tools -> Performance Meter, you can see how long your different Vision functions take. So after you figure all of this out, you will be able to answer your own question on whether you need to upgrade or not.
I hope this helps. Good luck with all of your applications. Thanks, and have a great day.
Regards,
DJ L.
