The FIRST EVER SLI Gaming Setup - 3DFX VooDoo II
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,553 words · ~7 min read
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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