Gadgetory

the coolness factor is there but putting multiple graphics cards in your gaming system it's kind of like dual wielding and Tomb Raider more firepower at the expense of some accuracy but while this truth has remained something of a constant SLI technology has existed for almost 20 years and has undergone many changes to reach its current state today so how did we get from here to here math drops vast 35 inch curved ultrawide monitor features a 34 40 by 1440 resolution and hundred hertz refresh rate check it out at the link below the year was 1998 Windows 98 with support for DirectX 5 was the hot new chick on the block having a Pentium 2 was a gamer's fever dream quake and unreal tournament were fresh on the scene and the first mp3 player had just launched so yeah ancient history at that time there were actually three key players in the 3d acceleration scene ATI since sold to AMD and divide it out as Radeon technologies group Nvidia that's with a big V my friends and 3d FX interactive and the high performance graphics cards they made looked a little something like this our focus is on the 3d effects Vudu - it had a whopping 4 megabyte frame buffer + 4 megabytes per texture mapping unit or TMU for a total of 12 Meg's of blazing fast 90 megahertz II do Ram see these three separate chips here one is the main graphics processor while these two are actually outboard TM use for your reference the current flagship Titan XP from Nvidia has 240 of these all of them built right into the die now 3d effects is philosophy generally prioritized raw speed over features for example their cards only even supported 16-bit color in 3d mode and they typically leg behind the competition in adopting new graphical features however these cards were so popular at the time that their proprietary API glide was adopted by major titles like unreal and provided both higher frame rates and superior image quality which in turn helped 3d effects win and maintain for a time market share and it was this first for speed that drove their research and development team to invent a technology that enabled a 3d workload to be split between two accelerators in a single system SLI been called scanline interleave was born and it seems obvious in hindsight but the concept of having each card render alternating lines of a 3d image was brilliant in its simplicity with all this horsepower you could play it up to 1024 by 768 I'm serious 1024 by 768 in 3d of course such a revolutionary technology had its drawbacks and teething issues aside from the expense of a pair of Voodoo twos at 2:49 us a pop you also needed a killer CPU preferably overclocked to eliminate bottlenecks a dedicated separate 2d card and a motherboard with support for this janky triple card configuration plus your network card modem sound card etc without running into resource allocation issues making matters worse game developer support was limited and the games that did work sometimes exhibited rendering artifacts and instability none of this stopped 3dfx from banking on this technology to help it compete with more feature Laden competition though and as for how that worked out well the company's last hurrah was a single card dual GPU solution the 5500 and shortly afterward 3dfx folded and its assets were bought out by Nvidia whose scalable link interface implementation of SLI will have to wait for part 2 of this story today is all about the ghosts of land parties past courtesy of the Slavs vintage gaming hardware collection I bring you fully functional the first SLI setup ever rocking a 700 megahertz Pentium 3 copper mine processor with SSE this well-preserved Dell dimension t700 R was perfect for the job once we upgraded it with a 40 gig hard drive a real vortex 2 soundcard and a 10 100 NIC to complement its 56k modem we watched her or rather listened to her come to life and if that floppy seek doesn't bring back memories well you guys must be a little younger than me getting the software set up on any pre broadband machine is a bit of a chore not helping matters is that if we didn't install the drivers in the right order we ended up in a blue screen loop and had to reload the OS but eventually we were ready and this was particularly exciting for me personally having never seen Mbutu SLI actually running in person first impressions then scaling was pretty good in 3d mark 99 at a hundred and sixty two percent of the performance of a single card then it fell off to a hundred and twenty three percent in 3d mark two thousand and one hundred and twenty percent in 3d mark 2001 the latter two results can probably be attributed not only to the lack of a proper SLI profile both of these benchmarks came out after 3d effects has demise but also to the fact that 2000 and 2001 rely more heavily on transform and lighting which we do cards had to offload to the CPU causing system-wide bottlenecking of course though we were just as interested in actual gaming performance and even more importantly we wanted to see the legendary Glide in action so get ready for screen capture first we fired up quake 2 and used the opening sequence to gauge the relative performance between OpenGL and Glide but while our original testing suggested we'd be looking at double the frame rate with Glide we later realized that the Voodoo dry servers overrode any and all in-game buffer swap settings and required an add-in DLL in order to turn that feature off so much to our surprise the OpenGL render mode actually ended up outperforming glide with just a single card but had no scaling in sli which enabled our two Voodoo's to break through the 100 FPS mark at 800 by 600 scaling a hundred and seventy-three percent and ending up on top next up unreal the quake 2 killer and the best-looking game of all time again we used the opening demo and the results were even more astonishing than in quake I mean would you look at that reflective surface on the bridge this was in 1999 for context this is what console gamers were dealing with at that point and you can clearly see too that the framerate is smooth as butter compared to direct3d and OpenGL with a 120 percent sli scaling factor according to our testing with that said when cross-checking our scaling results we did notice that the bench markers of your reported observing better sli scaling but every other graphics driver retried would hard lockup and glide before a benchmark run could even be completed not to be discouraged though we finally put our machine to the test in the granddaddy of all arena shooters the original Unreal Tournament using the original renderers circa 99 first the slab tried direct3d and I think I think I'll buy his leg excuse on this one then he tried opengl but with similar results time to call the pros at one 900 get help good day get help tech support line please state the case of your FPS emergency I'm actually being owned by bots graphics card using its voodoo - in SLI you need to enable glide renderer how do I do that move I'll do it there and would you look at that smooth as butter so there you have it an amazing piece of gaming history restored and fully functioning so stay tuned for part two and the next stage of the evolution of SLI tunnel bear is the easy-to-use VPN and it includes important features like a kill switch now normally before you connect to your VPN when you connect to a network let's say a Wi-Fi hotspot all of your traffic is actually unencrypted so in the few seconds that it takes to connect you've probably already broadcast your IP maybe a few DNS requests or a search query well vigilant bear from tunnel bear stops this from happening by blocking all outbound and inbound traffic so nothing leaks out before you connect this helps keep you private throughout the entire connection time and if your connection goes down for some reason vigilant bear kicks back in and stops all outbound and inbound traffic again until your VPN connection comes back Tunnel bear has clients for PC Mac Android iOS and even a Chrome extension and you can try it for free by going to tunnel bear comm slash LTT we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured maybe new SLI stuff I don't know at the link in the video description also down there's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join