Originally posted by: TekDemon
Originally posted by: sandorskiIt was great, for awhile. Once 3Dfx was able to acheive better performance in a single chip configuration they dropped SLI like a bad habit. It pushed gaming to new heights though.
What in the world are you talking about...the V5500 had on-board SLI, and that was the last board 3dfx made before going bankrupt...
3dfx just decided to put all their chips onto one board, although the real reason they went bankrupt was because they attempted to start manufacturing boards themselves and not just chips, and this alienated a lot of their distributors. That and that they couldn't quite get the V6000 to work right or use power properly.
I notice that nvidia has lately started showing a lot of weird 3dfx-ish leanings, but SLI was something I think that 3dfx really did right back in the day (before they started trying to shove 4 CPUs onto one board anyway)...
I toyed with a V2 SLI setup once although this was WAY after it's heyday when it had become pretty cheap, and it was still able to hold it's own in the then brand new Counter-Strike (although to be fair it had some unfortunate FPS dips even running wickedgl drivers). I think speed wise it was still quite potent even compared with the then brand new G400 I had bought (matrox), but visual quality wise the Matrox obviously beat the utter living daylights out of it (it looked like 2 different games...almost).
Anyway, I'm curious exactly how well their dynamic load balancing works...I know that ATI DOES have a similar technology already available, where the screen is split for rendering between two GPUs. The original MAXX technology didn't do that and instead simply had each GPU render alternate frames, which made it quite inefficient in terms of load balancing since often one frame can be much harder to render than another. So ATI went back to the drawing boards and came up with a similar "each GPU will draw half of the screen" idea with load balancing (at least this is what I recall...I might just be insane). However, I don't know how well they got load balancing to work since they never actually released another MAXX product ever again, but I'd be willing to bet that if these SLI'ed nvidia's actually sell, ATI will quickly release their next-gen MAXX line.
But this totally brings back memories of when I would drool over pictures of Voodoo2 SLIs in boot magazine...*drool*