although multi-GPU setups aren't quite as common as they used to be they're
still one of the hallmarks of a high-end computer because yeah
use more of them is a pretty intuitive solution to the need for more power but
how far back does the multi-GPU timeline go even though the practice of using
multiple gpus arguably had its heyday in the late 2000s and the early 2010s its
roots actually go back to 1998 and a company that doesn't even exist anymore
the 3d fx voodoo 2 introduced us to sli
which back then stood for scan line interleave an incredibly sexy name even
if the card's design wouldn't necessarily catch our eye today but
looks aren't everything as the voodoo 2 actually had three gpus on one card
meaning two cards in sli packed some really serious punch for the time anyway
the max resolution was a whopping 1024
by 768 and you actually had to pair your voodoos with a dedicated 2d card meaning
the setup would take lots of room in your rig and also hit your bank account
pretty hard but of course 3d fx didn't last much longer which you can learn
about up here and NVIDIA ended up buying their sli technology and renaming it
scalable link interface even sexier with
the first sli consumer cards from NVIDIA hitting the market in 2004. the earliest
NVIDIA sli gpus were part of the g4 6
series and sped up performance by using schemes called alternate frame rendering
and split frame rendering in alternate frame rendering one card would render
odd numbered frames while the other would render even-numbered frames
whereas in split frame rendering each card would render part of the same frame
sfr was particularly interesting since it used an algorithm to determine the
most efficient way to split a frame between two cards with
varying degrees of success ultimately whether afr or sfr was used depended on
which one was best for a specific game as determined by NVIDIA's engineers but
you can just grab these cards and plop them in your system and head off to frag
all the single GPU peasants you could headshot in unreal early sli required
specialized equipment like hefty power supplies and an sli bridge which
connected the frame buffers on the two cards but it was actually more
challenging than it is today to find sli compatible motherboards which originally
required NVIDIA chipsets and you needed both identical cards and video BIOS
versions although you could try mixing cards you were much more likely to run
into stability issues but if you could pull that all together the gains from
sli were seriously impressive in hot titles of the day such as unreal
tournament 2004 and the venerable half-life 2. meanwhile ati was
responding with its competing crossfire solution for its r400 series gpus which
were released in 2005 one year before ati was acquired by AMD
unlike sli you could actually mix different GPU models in crossfire with
some limitations but the first couple of generations actually required a clunky
y-shaped dvi dongle that plugged your monitor into both of your graphics cards
instead of just one but as time went on both teams red and green made
improvements sli started to work better with cards from different ad and board
manufacturers crossfire got a proper bridge instead of a clunky dongle and
three and even four card setups became possible this is when larger power
supplies started to become a little more common NVIDIA said the minimum you
should be rocking for a triple 8800 ultra setup was 1100 watts which would
be overkill for most high-end systems today on that note why exactly has
multi-GPU fallen off so hard in popularity well as we explained in this
video setups like sli and crossfire simply did not scale very well despite
scale being right in their very sexy names because of overhead and getting
the cards to communicate and synchronized properly diminishing returns quickly set in as you added more
cards meaning spending three times the bucks won't get you three times the
performance there have even been plenty of documented cases where a single good
quality graphics card would beat a multi-card setup even though you might
not expect that based solely on the relative power of the gpus and
frustratingly multi-GPU has been fraught with problems relating to driver and
software stability even into the contemporary era of gaming NVIDIA and
AMD have stopped supporting it meaning that games now need to natively support
it all of this has led to many enthusiasts preferring single card
systems instead sometimes less really is more just ask anyone
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