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the coolness factor is there but putting multiple graphics cards in your gaming

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system is kind of like dual wielding in tomb raider more firepower at the

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expense of some accuracy but while this truth has remained

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something of a constant sli technology

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has existed for almost 20 years and has

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undergone many changes to reach its current state today

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so how did we get from here to here

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mass drops vast 35 inch curved ultrawide monitor features a 3440 by 1440

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resolution and 100hz refresh rate check it out at the link below

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the year was 1998. Windows 98 with

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support for directx 5 was the hot new chick on the block having a pentium 2

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was a gamer's fever dream quake and unreal tournament were fresh on the

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scene and the first mp3 player had just launched

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so yeah ancient history at that time there were actually three

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key players in the 3d acceleration scene

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ati since sold to AMD and divided out as

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Radeon technologies group NVIDIA that's with a big v my friends and 3dfx

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interactive and the high performance graphics cards they made looked a little

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something like this our focus is on the 3dfx voodoo 2. it

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had a whopping 4 megabyte frame buffer

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plus 4 megabytes per texture mapping unit or tmu for a total of 12 megs of

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blazing fast 90 megahertz edo RAM

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see these three separate chips here one is the main graphics processor while

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these two are actually outboard tmus

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for your reference the current flagship titan xp from NVIDIA has

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240 of these all of them built right

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into the die now 3dfx's philosophy generally

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prioritized raw speed over features for

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example their cards only even supported

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16-bit color in 3d mode and they typically lagged behind the competition

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in adopting new graphical features however

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these cards were so popular at the time that their proprietary API glide was

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adopted by major titles like unreal and

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provided both higher frame rates and superior image quality which in turn

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helped 3dfx win and maintain for a time

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market share and it was this thirst for speed that

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drove their research and development team to invent a technology that enabled

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a 3d workload to be split between two

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accelerators in a single system sli then called scanline interleave was

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born and it seems obvious in hindsight but

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the concept of having each card render alternating lines of a 3d image was

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brilliant in its simplicity with all this horsepower you could play it up to

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1024 by 768. i'm serious 1024 by 768 in

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3d of course such a revolutionary

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technology had its drawbacks and teething issues

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aside from the expense of a pair of voodoo twos at 249 us a pop you also

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needed a killer CPU preferably overclocked to eliminate bottlenecks a

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dedicated separate 2d card

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and a motherboard with support for this janky triple card configuration plus

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your network card modem sound card etc

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without running into resource allocation issues

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making matters worse game developer support was limited and the games that

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did work sometimes exhibited rendering artifacts and instability

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none of this stopped 3dfx from banking on this technology to help it compete

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with more feature-laden competition though and as for how that worked out

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well the company's last hurrah was a single card dual GPU solution the 5500

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and shortly afterward 3dfx folded and

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its assets were bought out by NVIDIA whose scalable link interface

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implementation of sli will have to wait for part 2 of this story

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today is all about the ghost of lan parties past

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courtesy of the slavs vintage gaming hardware collection i bring you fully

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functional the first sli setup

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ever rocking a 700 megahertz pentium 3 copper

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mine processor with sse this well-preserved dell dimension t700r was

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perfect for the job once we upgraded it with a 40 gig hard

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drive a real vortex 2 sound card and a 10 100 nick to complement its 56k modem

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we watched her or rather listened to her come to life

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and if that floppy seek doesn't bring back memories

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well you guys must be a little younger than me getting the software set up on any

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pre-broadband machine is a bit of a chore not helping matters is that if we

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didn't install the drivers in the right order we ended up in a blue screen loop

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and had to reload the os but eventually we were ready and this

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was particularly exciting for me personally having never seen voodoo sli

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actually running in person first impressions then scaling was

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pretty good in 3dmark 99 at 162 percent

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of the performance of a single card then it fell off to a hundred and twenty

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three percent in 3d mark 2000 and 120

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percent in 3d mark 2001 the latter two results can probably be

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attributed not only to the lack of a proper sli profile both of these

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benchmarks came out after 3dfx's demise

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but also to the fact that 2000 and 2001

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rely more heavily on transform and lighting which voodoo cards had to

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offload to the CPU causing system-wide bottlenecking

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of course though we were just as interested in actual gaming performance

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and even more importantly we wanted to see

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the legendary glide in action so get

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ready for screen capture first we fired up quake 2 and used the

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opening sequence to gauge the relative performance between opengl and glide

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but while our original testing suggested

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we'd be looking at double the frame rate with glide we later realized that the

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voodoo drivers overrode any and all

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in-game buffer swap settings and required an add-in dll in order to turn

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that feature off so much to our surprise the opengl

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render mode actually ended up outperforming glide with just a single

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card but had no scaling in sli which

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enabled our two voodoos to break through the 100 FPS mark at 800x600 scaling

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173 and ending up on top

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next up unreal the quake 2 killer and

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the best looking game of all time

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again we used the opening demo and the results were even more astonishing than

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in quake i mean would you look at that reflective surface on the bridge this

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was in 1999 context this is what console gamers were

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dealing with at that point and you can clearly see too that the frame rate is

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smooth as butter compared to direct3d

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and opengl with a 120 sli scaling factor

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according to our testing with that said when cross-checking our

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scaling results we did notice that the benchmarkers of yore reported observing

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better sli scaling but every other graphics driver we tried

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would hard lock up and glide before a benchmark run could even be completed

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not to be discouraged though we finally put our machine to the test in the grand

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daddy of all arena shooters the original

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unreal tournament using the original

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renderers circa 99 first the slav tried direct 3d and i

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think i think i'll buy his leg excuse on

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this one then he tried opengl but with similar results

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time to call the pros at 1 900 get help

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good day get help tech support line please state the case of your FPS

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emergency i'm actually uh being owned by

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bots what graphics card are you using

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it's a voodoo 2 and sli you need to enable

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glide renderer how do i do that

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move i'll do it

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there fine

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head shot and would you look at that

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smooth as butter

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so there you have it an amazing piece of gaming history restored and fully

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functioning so stay tuned for part two and the next stage of the evolution of

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sli tunnelbear is the easy to use vpn and it

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includes important features like a kill switch now normally before you connect

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to your vpn when you connect to a network let's say a a wi-fi hotspot all

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of your traffic is actually unencrypted so in the few seconds that it takes to

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connect you've probably already broadcast your ip maybe a few dns

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requests or a search query well vigilant bear from tunnelbear stops this from

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happening by blocking all outbound and inbound traffic so nothing leaks out

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before you connect this helps keep you private throughout the entire connection

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time and if your connection goes down for some reason

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vigilant bear kicks back in and stops all outbound and inbound traffic again

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until your vpn connection comes back tunnelbear has clients for pc mac

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Android iOS and even a chrome extension

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and you can try it for free by going to tunnelbear.com

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LTT we're going to have that linked below

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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it was awesome get subscribed hit that like

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button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured maybe new sli

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stuff i don't know at the link in the video description also down there is our

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merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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you should totally join