Why did SLI fall out of grace for so many years?

[Magic Carpet]

Man. I remember play tomb raider 1 in dos3dfx mode. Was awesome. Paid 400 for the addon card and vesa feature connector.

Yeah, 3D acceleration in pure MS-DOS, that was cool.

 

[arkcom]

Does anyone else remember the Monster 3D pass-through video card? Basically was supposed to 'boost' your performance with some kind of post-processing or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Multimedia#Monster3D

I remember how much money I spent on gaming computers in those days. Ouch. When a 4MB GPU cost almost $400...

I still have one of those cards around somewhere.

 

[blackened23]

Yep. My Voodoo 3 was one of my favorite cards of all time. It ran *everything* maxed out and it cost around $100, perhaps even less. My Voodoo 2s cost way more for an inferior gaming experience.

Hmm? Huh? The voodoo 2 was the absolute king of the hill performance when it was released, and cost 200$. I remember buying one at Best Buy when it was released for 199.99. Creative Labs Voodoo2......was such an awesome card.

 

[blackened23]

Does anyone else remember the Monster 3D pass-through video card? Basically was supposed to 'boost' your performance with some kind of post-processing or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Multimedia#Monster3D

I remember how much money I spent on gaming computers in those days. Ouch. When a 4MB GPU cost almost $400...

You have it wrong here. The Monster 3d was an actual PCI card which included a cable to connect from your 2d accelerator to serve as a pass through - the 3dfx voodoo did not have any 2d functions, it was for 3d only. 1 card would be your 2d accelerator and the monster 3d was a 3dfx voodoo card which served as your 3d accelerator.

The monster 3d was a full blown 3d accelerator, not sure what you mean by "some kind of post processing." The voodoo also cost 150$-199$ upon release, and 2d cards were generally cheap depending on which one you bought. You could go big with a matrox millenium but you could certainly get a fine 2d card for 50-99$.

 

[SickBeast]

Hmm? Huh? The voodoo 2 was the absolute king of the hill performance when it was released, and cost 200$. I remember buying one at Best Buy when it was released for 199.99.

Yeah and for $100 the Voodoo3 2000 could beat out Voodoo2 SLI. That's 1/4 the cost for the same performance, plus it was a single card so you didn't even need a 2d card.

 

[Magic Carpet]

The monster 3d was a full blown 3d accelerator, not sure what you mean by "some kind of post processing." The voodoo also cost 150$-199$ upon release, and 2d cards were generally cheap depending on which one you bought. You could go big with a matrox millenium but you could certainly get a fine 2d card for 50-99$.

Yeah, the pass-thru cable somewhat blurred the picture on the bigger screens. Luckily V3 came to the rescue later on with VERY strong 2D capabilities. V5 also had some interesting features, both 2D/3D but was too late to the party. Nvidia hadn't fixed its IQ (both 2D & 3D) problems until Geforce 3, if I remember it right.

 

[arkcom]

I still have a new in box Geforce 256 with the 3d glasses. My computer at the time didn't have agp, and I overpaid for it, so I just sat on it.

sorry about going OT

 

[Hauk]

I still have a new in box Geforce 256 with the 3d glasses. My computer at the time didn't have agp, and I overpaid for it, so I just sat on it.

sorry about going OT

Nice!

 

[2is]

Does anyone else remember the Monster 3D pass-through video card? Basically was supposed to 'boost' your performance with some kind of post-processing or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Multimedia#Monster3D

I remember how much money I spent on gaming computers in those days. Ouch. When a 4MB GPU cost almost $400...

They were dedicated 3d cards. Did nothing in 2d mode other than pass the signal from your 2d card to the monitor. Once you fired up a glide or OpenGL game it would take over the 3d rendering.

I still have my Voodoo2 cards. Things aren't the same today. I will never enjoy PC gaming as much as I did back then.

 

[Compddd]

I started out with a Voodoo1 from Canopus 3D and playing Myth the Fallen Lords, those were the days

I think I originally got the Voodoo card for AH-64D Longbow from Janes lol

 

[Obsoleet]

Steam join date: September 12th 2003

First day Steam opened here. )

 

[RocksteadyDotNet]

Were you into computer gaming before 1999?

SLI did work with AGP, I was using it in 1998 and 1999.

I was using a VooDoo 2 AGP with a Diamond Stealth 3D PCI in SLI.

Err, no you weren't.

Why would you lie about shit like this?

 

[Obsoleet]

Could be an incorrect memory. That's been a long time back Rocksteady. I don't recall ever having SLI in the 3dfx day... and hardly remember how it worked. I had a 4MB Voodoo1 (Diamond Monster 3D) though. Great card. Much better than the other stuff on the market besides maybe the Rendition Verite cards, those weren't too shabby either.

NV & ATI came on strong though. I still don't, and didn't think that 3dfx was doing that poorly in cards, I was cool with the Voodoo3 and even Voodoo4s.. seems management took them down rather than truly lackluster product. Sure, by V4 they were faltering a bit and not on top of the market like in the past, but they weren't bad either and certainly not the worst stuff out there.

Personally I liked what 3dfx had all through till the end. I switched to Nvidia after that because they had some cheap cards, and AMD recently.

Each "era"- 3dfx (late 90s)->Nvidia (early 00s)->AMD (2010+) had its perks.

 

[ViRGE]

To answer the question of "Why did SLI fall out of grace for so many years?", it came down to 2 things.

1) As others have mentioned, AGP. Now AGP is basically just a supercharged version of PCI, but keep in mind why we needed it in the first place. PCI was a shared fabric, and a single video card was reaching (and later exceeding) the 133MB/sec it could provide. So even though you could conceptually do multi-card SLI using PCI+AGP, the fact of the matter is that you'd be choking the living daylights out of the PCI bus.

2) 3dfx went bust. Because of the problems presented by AGP/PCI they never did multi-card SLI past the Voodoo 2, but they used SLI internally on the Voodoo 5 series. The death of 3dfx quickly put an end to SLI, and since pixel shading was practically incompatible with Scan Line Interleaving, no one was in a huge rush to reimplement it. SLI's revival was NVIDIA's doing (they purchased 3dfx), when in 2004 they launched their modern AFR SLI incarnation on the GeForce 6 series.

 

[Lonbjerg]

To answer the question of "Why did SLI fall out of grace for so many years?", it came down to 2 things.

1) As others have mentioned, AGP. Now AGP is basically just a supercharged version of PCI, but keep in mind why we needed it in the first place. PCI was a shared fabric, and a single video card was reaching (and later exceeding) the 133MB/sec it could provide. So even though you could conceptually do multi-card SLI using PCI+AGP, the fact of the matter is that you'd be choking the living daylights out of the PCI bus.

2) 3dfx went bust. Because of the problems presented by AGP/PCI they never did multi-card SLI past the Voodoo 2, but they used SLI internally on the Voodoo 5 series. The death of 3dfx quickly put an end to SLI, and since pixel shading was practically incompatible with Scan Line Interleaving, no one was in a huge rush to reimplement it. SLI's revival was NVIDIA's doing (they purchased 3dfx), when in 2004 they launched their modern AFR SLI incarnation on the GeForce 6 series.

AGP has been a long time since, you might not remeber this:

http://www.planet3dnow.de/artikel/diverses/agp30eng/4.shtml

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]New features (continued)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]And finally, the one feature, which makes AGP 3.0 the best implementation of accelerated graphics ever: The possibility of having multiple AGP ports. This AGP 2.0 enhancement allows motherboard manufacturers, to create motherboards with more than one AGP slot. Due to the fact, that the use of a PCI card for a second or third display can slow down graphics big time, professionals have been waiting for this feature since AGP 1.0 was specified[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] in the first place.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Even multiple displays, connected to one AGP video card, can – under given circumstances – cause a slowdown. By using a second AGP card, these issues wouldn't exist anymore, even the use of four displays without causing a loss of performance is possible.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Also, SMP computers will benefit from this big time. Graphics performance is a bottleneck of SMP computers, since all available microprocessors have to share one single AGP-Bus and AGP video card. In case, more than one microprocessor accesses the AGP video card simultaneously, at least one of them has to stall, which results in poor performance.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]By implementing more than one AGP-Bus, each microprocessor could have its own AGP video card, meaning performance won't drop, if both processors try to access the video card simultaneously. Given, that each AGP-Port has its own AGP-Aperture, as well as its own GART, conflicts and stalls are prevented before they can even occur.[/FONT]

Not it never became to anything.

AGP wasn't hodling back graphics either, if you look here:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=172687&highlight=FEAR+7800GS

the 7800GS+ was a fullflegded 7800GT on AGP...the 7800GS++ was a fullflegded 7800GTX on AGP

My "poor" Intel 2.4Ghz Northwood AGP system was kicking down AMD rigs with PCI-e(In an era where Intel rig were supposed to bad for gaming)...AGP had much life in it...but we got chaugt up "Oh look...new SHINEY!"

Just like PCI-e 3.0 right now, not working better than PCI-e 2.0...due to the fact that PCI-e 2.0 currently is underutilized.

SLI on AGP would have been very possible...if it wasn't for the "Shiney" factor that still hanuts us this very day

 

[poohbear]

I joined steam the day half-life 2 was released, November 2004.




No insult intended. People new to PC gaming will never know what it was like to 32 megs of ram, and 4 meg video card. While posting in a forum, you never know the other persons level of experience.

When the VooDoo 2 came out, it was like a giant leap in video technology.

It seems that SLI technology faded away for a few years, then made a comeback.

Where would we be today if Nvidia had taken the VooDoo 2 and ran with it?

lol you make it sound like they were missing out. Frankly, the newer games are much better than the older games. The exception of course is Planescape: Torment, that was gold.

I don't get your post though, you say you've been gaming for decades, and so YOU should be telling us why SLI didn't work out, not the other way around, no?

Voodoo graphics? you're referencing stuff that was ages ago. Its like me asking who remembers playing pong on Atari 64 & what happened to Atari?

 

[Lonbjerg]

lol you make it sound like they were missing out. Frankly, the newer games are much better than the older games. The exception of course is Planescape: Torment, that was gold.

I don't get your post though, you say you've been gaming for decades, and so YOU should be telling us why SLI didn't work out, not the other way around, no?

Voodoo graphics? you're referencing stuff that was ages ago. Its like me asking who remembers playing pong on Atari 64 & what happened to Atari?

Actually they are not, they might look pretiter...but try eg. to play the old Tie-Fighter or X-wing games.
The difficulty os those will teach you how far games have fallen.

Games to day are FAR to easy...game are complete in hours...not days or weeks.

I actually think everyone should try and dig up some old games...and get shocked over how EASY games are to day...sadly.

 

[2is]

lol you make it sound like they were missing out. Frankly, the newer games are much better than the older games. The exception of course is Planescape: Torment, that was gold.

They did miss out but it's all relative. We just don't see the "breakthroughs" today that we did back in the day. Wolfemstein 3D was a huge leap forward, then came Doom which was another gargantuan leap forward, after that was the huge gains in performance and eye candy that Glide brought us. We just don't get those gigantic leap forward these days. Far Cry was close to achieving that caliber but even that was many years ago.

 

[poohbear]

lol no dude, i don't finish games in hours anymore. Now with family, work, hobbies and other responsibilities it takes me weeks to finish a game! i only play 1-2 hours 3-4x a week IF that, so a 40 hour game is gonna last me 3-4 months!

 

[Magic Carpet]

Actually they are not, they might look pretiter...but try eg. to play the old Tie-Fighter or X-wing games.
The difficulty os those will teach you how far games have fallen.

Games to day are FAR to easy...game are complete in hours...not days or weeks.

I actually think everyone should try and dig up some old games...and get shocked over how EASY games are to day...sadly.

Agreed. Target audience changed as a result, however.

P.S. Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition coming out this summer. The original version supported Glide, by the way. Old-skool gaming to the masses

 

[Cerb]

Yep. My Voodoo 3 was one of my favorite cards of all time. It ran *everything* maxed out and it cost around $100, perhaps even less. My Voodoo 2s cost way more for an inferior gaming experience.

So, you had a better gaming experience with slow NVidia cards, slow and unstable ATi cards, and/or software rendering, compared to a Voodoo3?

It's a rather poor comparison. You couldn't buy a Voodoo3 when the Voodoo2 was king, nor any of the Voodoo3's competition, which helped to drive down prices.

 

[Texashiker]

It seems that we agree that SLI in the 1990s was great and easy to obtain. Regardless of what cards we are talking about, the technology was out there in the late 1990s.

"Why" did SLI fade from the limelight for 1/2 a decade?

The SLI from the 1990s and the SLI from today are a little different, but its the same principle of two video cards working together.

 

[Olikan]

The major reason was probably geometry and 3dfx scan line interleave was probably too much of a hassle to continue from nVidia's perspective. AFR made more sense on it also scales geometry.

IMO,
amd and nvidia should develop, something more reliable than AFR

 

[Lonbjerg]

It seems that we agree that SLI in the 1990s was great and easy to obtain. Regardless of what cards we are talking about, the technology was out there in the late 1990s.

"Why" did SLI fade from the limelight for 1/2 a decade?

The SLI from the 1990s and the SLI from today are a little different, but its the same principle of two video cards working together.

No, read the thread...the technologies are not a little different...the are VERY different.

3Dfx's SLI != NVIDIA's SLI

While they both use multicards, they way they render are WAY different.

3Dfx SLI had 1 card render all odd lines (1,3,5,7,9...) and one render all even lines (2,4,6,8,10...)

Hence the name: Scan-Line Interleave

NVIDIA SLI had in the beginning 3 render modes.

CFR (Checkboard Frame Render)
Rendering the screen in tiles like on a chessboard...the method was dropped very early on.

SFR (Scissor Frame Render)
Rendering ~50% af the screen one 1 card and the other ~50% on the other card. This 50/50 spilt wasn't even though as the ground often was more computational heavy then the ground, so the "middle-line" moved a lot. This method has also been dropped today.

AFR (Alternat Frame Render)
This render frame 1 on the first card, then frame 2 on the second card, the first card then renders frame 3...and so on. This method of rendering is what gives the best consistant performance boost..and that is why it is the only rendering method left. This rendermethod is also the origin of microstuttering.

so would you please read your own thread...and stop comparing the two different technoliges as "little different"...they are WAY different.

 

[Lonbjerg]

IMO,
amd and nvidia should develop, something more reliable than AFR

Like what?
SFR has been tested...and was to problematic.
CFR has been tested...and was WAY to problematic.
Then you are left with AFR.

What do you suggest...besides pixiefaries...to use as a method?