WEBVTT

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when NVIDIA bought out the defunct company 3dfx they acquired their patents

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and intellectual property including the trademark sli name that had been used to

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describe 3dfx's system for using multiple graphics cards working together

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to achieve better gaming performance but

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by the time they reintroduced sli to consumers its underlying technology had

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undergone some very significant changes

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let's see just what made the very first generation NVIDIA sli tick

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after this message from our sponsor that keeps Linus tech tips ticking

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all right so in the late 90s 3dfx made a handful of now famous blunders first

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they decided to manufacture their cards themselves as opposed to just selling

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chips and providing reference designs to add and board partners but

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because their new factory couldn't compete on either quality or cost with

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taiwanese and chinese-based aibs oem relationships that they had hoped

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would come never materialized two their focus on raw horsepower rather

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than modern features allowed NVIDIA to steal the market share crown from their

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flagship voodoo three then put the nail in their coffin with

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the GeForce 256 which arrived earlier to

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the market and was vastly technologically superior to the delayed

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napalm core that they used in the voodoo 4 and voodoo 5.

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3dfx filed for bankruptcy in 2002. so

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then it only took two years for NVIDIA to decide that selling two graphics

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cards rather than one per customer is pretty cool and roll out sli

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again except that this time it stood for

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scalable link interface rather than scan

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line interleave this is because instead of having each card render alternating

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lines of a single frame NVIDIA opted to use two new approaches

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to splitting the rendering load between the two cards

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in alternate frame rendering or afr

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each card takes turns rendering a full frame this was the preferred method and

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typically resulted in the best performance scaling and in split frame

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rendering or sfr the 3d scene would need

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to be broken down horizontally depending on geometry load with one card assigned

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to render the bottom part of the frame while the other handled the top now via

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both of these methods whether it was outputting half of every frame or

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alternating full frames the secondary card would send its output to the upper

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or mastercard via the brand new 400

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megahertz one Gigabyte per second sli

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connector then that top card would output the final image to the screen

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now it was this high bandwidth connection that gave NVIDIA's solution

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both its name and its high performance or well

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sometimes high performance you see without a software sli profile the

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second card would remain either completely unused or even end up hurting

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performance and because the system had no way of knowing

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on its own which sli rendering settings would work

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best for a given game it was up to the driver team to hand validate both brand

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new games and some significant older titles so this process was more work

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than you might think and it wouldn't be until many driver updates later during

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the summer after launch that the green team would ship their 100th sli profile

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now let's talk about the hardware during the first unveiling NVIDIA was

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actually using a xeon platform based on the 7525 chipset for its newfangled

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high-speed pci express expansion slots

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but despite these demos being originally run

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on an Intel chipset NVIDIA ended up requiring users to

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purchase a motherboard that was equipped with an sli ready variant of NVIDIA's

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own enforce4 chipset now

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the successful user modification of non-sli certified boards

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raised quite a few questions about whether this was an artificial

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limitation designed to help NVIDIA maintain a foothold in the chipset

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market but i digress

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the next thing you needed was a powerful CPU to keep both cards well fed with

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data so we're using an overclocked opteron that will give us similar

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performance to the fastest CPU at the time the single core 2.6 gigahertz fx 55

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third a good 24 pin atx power supply was

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strongly recommended now the 6800 gts

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that we have in here their TDP is only 67 watts and our whole system pulls only

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about 260 watts from the wall under load

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but there's more to a quality power supply than just wattage one having a

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suitable 12 volt rail distribution was absolutely necessary to keep it from

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just turning off when you fired up a game and two

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native pci express power connectors were a definite bonus at the time so you

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didn't have to use adapter dongles onto the cards themselves sli technology

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required pretty much identical cards

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like this pair of matched xfx 6800 gts

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and initially even the BIOS revisions on

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the cards needed to be the same though that did ease up over time to the point

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where even slightly mismatched cards would equalize according to the clock

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speeds of the slower card finally a well ventilated case was a

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must most of the cases from this era used 80

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millimeter cooling fans so especially given the poor design of the reverse

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blowing single slot cooler on our card

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it was common to see side intakes modified into cases after the fact like

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this one and even with our extra airflow

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our cards hit a toasty 85 degrees under

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load now let's look at performance NVIDIA

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cited 1.87x scaling in synthetic benchmarks

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but our own testing gave us 1.64 1.82

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and 1.76 though it should be noted that when it

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comes to real games we actually managed an amazing 1.98

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scaling in half-life 2 and we saw up to 1.86

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in far cry so in essence

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this tech when it worked would enable you to step up to the next

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image quality and or resolution level and what's cool is that the higher the

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load the better it scaled furthermore unless it ran out of vram

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which does not add up between the cards it's cloned the system took games from

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the next gen like fear which was so

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demanding it initially shipped with a 1024 by 768 maximum resolution from

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cinematically playable to actually playable and before you ask

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yes yes indeed it can at a mixture of medium

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to low settings this machine produced over 40 FPS at 1024x768

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in a game that came out three years

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after this card launched neat right

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now let's talk downsides and there were plenty the expense of a fast

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CPU sli ready board and power supply aside

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alternate frame rendering introduced a temporal artifact known as micro

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stuttering where the frame rates were high but some users reported choppy or

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jittery in-game animations and

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this tech lived and died by the existence of an sli profile with some

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games whether by design or due to just

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not getting around to it never ending up working with sli meaning

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that that second card that you bought was a terrible value if your favorite

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game didn't end up scaling furthermore there were some general

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quality of life issues including but not limited to the fact that two cards is

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louder than one changing sli modes required a system

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reboot at the start your second monitor would go black once the game was full

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screen and i had this bizarre issue with azurius bittorrent client remember that

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where it and firefox if they were running at the same time sli would

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disable itself but still show enabled in the control panel and the list kind of

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goes on so bottom line despite its first generation flaws

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sli when it worked was so powerful that

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it exceeded NVIDIA's next generation 7900 gtx's performance making it really

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freaking cool when it worked

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LTT to get 10 off your first purchase we're going to have that linked below

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so thanks for watching guys massive shout out to benoit pierre for sending

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us a working sli motherboard for our test if this video sucked you guys you know

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what to do but it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check

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out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description

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also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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you should totally join it is 5 10. i need to go to lan show now