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although multi-GPU setups aren't quite as common as they used to be they're

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still one of the hallmarks of a high-end computer because yeah

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use more of them is a pretty intuitive solution to the need for more power but

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how far back does the multi-GPU timeline go even though the practice of using

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multiple gpus arguably had its heyday in the late 2000s and the early 2010s its

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roots actually go back to 1998 and a company that doesn't even exist anymore

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the 3d fx voodoo 2 introduced us to sli

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which back then stood for scan line interleave an incredibly sexy name even

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if the card's design wouldn't necessarily catch our eye today but

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looks aren't everything as the voodoo 2 actually had three gpus on one card

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meaning two cards in sli packed some really serious punch for the time anyway

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the max resolution was a whopping 1024

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by 768 and you actually had to pair your voodoos with a dedicated 2d card meaning

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the setup would take lots of room in your rig and also hit your bank account

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pretty hard but of course 3d fx didn't last much longer which you can learn

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about up here and NVIDIA ended up buying their sli technology and renaming it

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scalable link interface even sexier with

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the first sli consumer cards from NVIDIA hitting the market in 2004. the earliest

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NVIDIA sli gpus were part of the g4 6

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series and sped up performance by using schemes called alternate frame rendering

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and split frame rendering in alternate frame rendering one card would render

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odd numbered frames while the other would render even-numbered frames

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whereas in split frame rendering each card would render part of the same frame

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sfr was particularly interesting since it used an algorithm to determine the

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most efficient way to split a frame between two cards with

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varying degrees of success ultimately whether afr or sfr was used depended on

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which one was best for a specific game as determined by NVIDIA's engineers but

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you can just grab these cards and plop them in your system and head off to frag

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all the single GPU peasants you could headshot in unreal early sli required

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specialized equipment like hefty power supplies and an sli bridge which

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connected the frame buffers on the two cards but it was actually more

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challenging than it is today to find sli compatible motherboards which originally

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required NVIDIA chipsets and you needed both identical cards and video BIOS

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versions although you could try mixing cards you were much more likely to run

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into stability issues but if you could pull that all together the gains from

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sli were seriously impressive in hot titles of the day such as unreal

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tournament 2004 and the venerable half-life 2. meanwhile ati was

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responding with its competing crossfire solution for its r400 series gpus which

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were released in 2005 one year before ati was acquired by AMD

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unlike sli you could actually mix different GPU models in crossfire with

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some limitations but the first couple of generations actually required a clunky

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y-shaped dvi dongle that plugged your monitor into both of your graphics cards

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instead of just one but as time went on both teams red and green made

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improvements sli started to work better with cards from different ad and board

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manufacturers crossfire got a proper bridge instead of a clunky dongle and

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three and even four card setups became possible this is when larger power

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supplies started to become a little more common NVIDIA said the minimum you

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should be rocking for a triple 8800 ultra setup was 1100 watts which would

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be overkill for most high-end systems today on that note why exactly has

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multi-GPU fallen off so hard in popularity well as we explained in this

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video setups like sli and crossfire simply did not scale very well despite

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scale being right in their very sexy names because of overhead and getting

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the cards to communicate and synchronized properly diminishing returns quickly set in as you added more

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cards meaning spending three times the bucks won't get you three times the

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performance there have even been plenty of documented cases where a single good

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quality graphics card would beat a multi-card setup even though you might

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not expect that based solely on the relative power of the gpus and

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frustratingly multi-GPU has been fraught with problems relating to driver and

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software stability even into the contemporary era of gaming NVIDIA and

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AMD have stopped supporting it meaning that games now need to natively support

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it all of this has led to many enthusiasts preferring single card

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systems instead sometimes less really is more just ask anyone

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