the coolness factor is there but putting multiple graphics cards in your gaming
system is kind of like dual wielding in tomb raider more firepower at the
expense of some accuracy but while this truth has remained
something of a constant sli technology
has existed for almost 20 years and has
undergone many changes to reach its current state today
so how did we get from here to here
mass drops vast 35 inch curved ultrawide monitor features a 3440 by 1440
resolution and 100hz refresh rate check it out at the link below
the year was 1998. Windows 98 with
support for directx 5 was the hot new chick on the block having a pentium 2
was a gamer's fever dream quake and unreal tournament were fresh on the
scene and the first mp3 player had just launched
so yeah ancient history at that time there were actually three
key players in the 3d acceleration scene
ati since sold to AMD and divided out as
Radeon technologies group NVIDIA that's with a big v my friends and 3dfx
interactive and the high performance graphics cards they made looked a little
something like this our focus is on the 3dfx voodoo 2. it
had a whopping 4 megabyte frame buffer
plus 4 megabytes per texture mapping unit or tmu for a total of 12 megs of
blazing fast 90 megahertz edo RAM
see these three separate chips here one is the main graphics processor while
these two are actually outboard tmus
for your reference the current flagship titan xp from NVIDIA has
240 of these all of them built right
into the die now 3dfx's philosophy generally
prioritized raw speed over features for
example their cards only even supported
16-bit color in 3d mode and they typically lagged behind the competition
in adopting new graphical features however
these cards were so popular at the time that their proprietary API glide was
adopted by major titles like unreal and
provided both higher frame rates and superior image quality which in turn
helped 3dfx win and maintain for a time
market share and it was this thirst for speed that
drove their research and development team to invent a technology that enabled
a 3d workload to be split between two
accelerators in a single system sli then called scanline interleave was
born and it seems obvious in hindsight but
the concept of having each card render alternating lines of a 3d image was
brilliant in its simplicity with all this horsepower you could play it up to
1024 by 768. i'm serious 1024 by 768 in
3d of course such a revolutionary
technology had its drawbacks and teething issues
aside from the expense of a pair of voodoo twos at 249 us a pop you also
needed a killer CPU preferably overclocked to eliminate bottlenecks a
dedicated separate 2d card
and a motherboard with support for this janky triple card configuration plus
your network card modem sound card etc
without running into resource allocation issues
making matters worse game developer support was limited and the games that
did work sometimes exhibited rendering artifacts and instability
none of this stopped 3dfx from banking on this technology to help it compete
with more feature-laden competition though and as for how that worked out
well the company's last hurrah was a single card dual GPU solution the 5500
and shortly afterward 3dfx folded and
its assets were bought out by NVIDIA whose scalable link interface
implementation of sli will have to wait for part 2 of this story
today is all about the ghost of lan parties past
courtesy of the slavs vintage gaming hardware collection i bring you fully
functional the first sli setup
ever rocking a 700 megahertz pentium 3 copper
mine processor with sse this well-preserved dell dimension t700r was
perfect for the job once we upgraded it with a 40 gig hard
drive a real vortex 2 sound card and a 10 100 nick to complement its 56k modem
we watched her or rather listened to her come to life
and if that floppy seek doesn't bring back memories
well you guys must be a little younger than me getting the software set up on any
pre-broadband machine is a bit of a chore not helping matters is that if we
didn't install the drivers in the right order we ended up in a blue screen loop
and had to reload the os but eventually we were ready and this
was particularly exciting for me personally having never seen voodoo sli
actually running in person first impressions then scaling was
pretty good in 3dmark 99 at 162 percent
of the performance of a single card then it fell off to a hundred and twenty
three percent in 3d mark 2000 and 120
percent in 3d mark 2001 the latter two results can probably be
attributed not only to the lack of a proper sli profile both of these
benchmarks came out after 3dfx's demise
but also to the fact that 2000 and 2001
rely more heavily on transform and lighting which voodoo cards had to
offload to the CPU causing system-wide bottlenecking
of course though we were just as interested in actual gaming performance
and even more importantly we wanted to see
the legendary glide in action so get
ready for screen capture first we fired up quake 2 and used the
opening sequence to gauge the relative performance between opengl and glide
but while our original testing suggested
we'd be looking at double the frame rate with glide we later realized that the
voodoo drivers overrode any and all
in-game buffer swap settings and required an add-in dll in order to turn
that feature off so much to our surprise the opengl
render mode actually ended up outperforming glide with just a single
card but had no scaling in sli which
enabled our two voodoos to break through the 100 FPS mark at 800x600 scaling
173 and ending up on top
next up unreal the quake 2 killer and
the best looking game of all time
again we used the opening demo and the results were even more astonishing than
in quake i mean would you look at that reflective surface on the bridge this
was in 1999 context this is what console gamers were
dealing with at that point and you can clearly see too that the frame rate is
smooth as butter compared to direct3d
and opengl with a 120 sli scaling factor
according to our testing with that said when cross-checking our
scaling results we did notice that the benchmarkers of yore reported observing
better sli scaling but every other graphics driver we tried
would hard lock up and glide before a benchmark run could even be completed
not to be discouraged though we finally put our machine to the test in the grand
daddy of all arena shooters the original
unreal tournament using the original
renderers circa 99 first the slav tried direct 3d and i
think i think i'll buy his leg excuse on
this one then he tried opengl but with similar results
time to call the pros at 1 900 get help
good day get help tech support line please state the case of your FPS
emergency i'm actually uh being owned by
bots what graphics card are you using
it's a voodoo 2 and sli you need to enable
glide renderer how do i do that
move i'll do it
there fine
head shot and would you look at that
smooth as butter
so there you have it an amazing piece of gaming history restored and fully
functioning so stay tuned for part two and the next stage of the evolution of
sli tunnelbear is the easy to use vpn and it
includes important features like a kill switch now normally before you connect
to your vpn when you connect to a network let's say a a wi-fi hotspot all
of your traffic is actually unencrypted so in the few seconds that it takes to
connect you've probably already broadcast your ip maybe a few dns
requests or a search query well vigilant bear from tunnelbear stops this from
happening by blocking all outbound and inbound traffic so nothing leaks out
before you connect this helps keep you private throughout the entire connection
time and if your connection goes down for some reason
vigilant bear kicks back in and stops all outbound and inbound traffic again
until your vpn connection comes back tunnelbear has clients for pc mac
Android iOS and even a chrome extension
and you can try it for free by going to tunnelbear.com
LTT we're going to have that linked below
so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it was awesome get subscribed hit that like
button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured maybe new sli
stuff i don't know at the link in the video description also down there is our
merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which
you should totally join