Why was 3DFX "SLI" better than modern "SLI" & Crossfire?

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: jzodda
I remember those times very fondly. A matrox G200 for 2d and 2 8meg Megabyte Voodoo 2's in SLI

I was in gaming heaven back then.

My first computer had a G200 in it. Paired that with a single 8MB Creative Labs Voodoo 2 shortly after purchasing the system. I had 96MB of EDO RAM and I distinctly remember being asked several times what I was going to do with that much memory. Going from an AMD 233Mhz with 8MB Voodoo 2 to a PII 400Mhz with a Voodoo 3 was gaming bliss back in the day.

 

[superunknown98]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: Doctorweir

Originally posted by: Wag
Let us not forget that 3dfx's first dedicated combo 2d/3d card was a piece of trash.

Really? In my memory it shows the Voodoo 3 as having been the superior card regarding 2D image quality. Admittedly it lacked 32bit color support, but back in the times this drew too much power for most nVidia cards to render anyway.
Remember Ultima 9? Was only playable on a V3 with Glide...D3D plain sucked back then.

But well...with the V4/V5 came the nVidia performance takeover...

Because 3dfx refused to believe that having a T&L unit on the GPU was useful. Also, They relied on proprietary technology that never got used. I forget exactly what it was called but it enabled motion blur among other things. No games used it, total flop.

Ha, you are right and it makes me laugh becasue Nvidia's marketing team pushed T&L to the point where every analyst forcasted 3DFX's demise for not having it. But if you look at how many games actually made use of first generation T&L, you could count them on one hand. It wasn't until DX8 that pixel shaders were really used. And as for the Voodoo 4 and 5's Field of vision and motion blur and Sli, well now you see those on almost every game released. 3DFX was ahead of their time, they tried to force the market in a direction it wasn't ready to go. Well that and all their bad accounting practices. Always makes me wonder what would have happened if they had released their next gen hardware.

 

[CP5670]

I used a Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 3k back then, although I also had a TNT with the V2. I stuck with 3dfx mainly for the Glide support, since most of the stuff I played was Glide-only or ran best on Glide (the Descent, Freespace and Unreal games in particular). Those cards powered my games perfectly for years.

I have a V2 SLI setup in my retro game system (got the second card on ebay for $15 in 2003). It works perfectly in everything I've tried, which is much more than I can say about Nvidia's SLI, but it gets practically no use these days since I only have one or two Glide-only games that still need it. I mainly got it for running the Glide port of Descent 2, but a much better fanmade version that runs on modern systems has been released since then.

 

[boatillo]

As others have said 3dfx SLI != Nvidia SLI

I swear Nvidia bought 3dfx *just* to use the SLI acronym, even if they changed its meaning.


I ran a v4500 AGP card to play diablo2 Performed wayyyyyy better than any nvidia or ati card could for that game and the glide mode unlocked better special effects.

 

[thilanliyan]

Mine was a Trident 512k (yes that's right 1/2 megabyte ) video card back in 1992 (DOS was the ish back then). It played my games very well at the time like Dune 1&2, Xenobots, and Prince of Persia.

 

[brencat]

Originally posted by: Snooper
I STILL have that card sitting in my spare parts pile. That was such a revolutionary change in 3D graphics that I just can't bring myself to get rid of it, even though I KNOW that I will never use it again for anything.

Hear you there Snooper. I too had dual Voodoo 2s in SLI linked to an 8MB Diamond card with an old P2 350 system. Ended up giving one of those V2s to my Dad back in 2001 for his old Dell system, and I kept the other one...still sitting in my closet in the original Red box with that Romulan/Vulcan character on the front cover!

I remember buying the second V2 specifically for the game Nuclear Strike because it was a glide game and the Diamond card couldn't handle it. That game kicked serious a$$...you could blow up anything and the graphics were terrific at the time.

 

[CP5670]

Nuclear Strike is awesome, although rather short. The gameplay is great and the cutscenes are hilarious. It's one of the two Glide-only games I have that can still make use of my V2s.

 

[Rage187]

it rendered differently back then.

Old SLI = One card rendered the even frames and the other rendered the odd frames.

New SLI = Each card renders a different area of the screen (Top/Bottom)

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: Rage187
it rendered differently back then.

Old SLI = One card rendered the even frames and the other rendered the odd frames.

New SLI = Each card renders a different area of the screen (Top/Bottom)

My knowledge of SLI is quite limited, but I thought AFR was every other frame?

 

[Rage187]

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777

Originally posted by: Rage187
it rendered differently back then.

Old SLI = One card rendered the even frames and the other rendered the odd frames.

New SLI = Each card renders a different area of the screen (Top/Bottom)

My knowledge of SLI is quite limited, but I thought AFR was every other frame?

per the SLI wiki:

3dfx's SLI design was the first attempt, in the consumer PC market, at combining the rendering power of two video cards. The cards were connected by a small ribbon cable inside the PC, and a VGA-to-VGA cable from card-to-card that shared graphics and synchronization information between the cards. Each card rendered alternating horizontal lines of pixels composing a frame.

looks like it render alternating lines and not frames.


Also, I owned a SLI rig back in 98 when it was introduced. I spent $600 for 2x12MB Voodoo2s from Software ETC. I wasn't expecting double the frame rate, I was expecting to run 1024x768 in Quake2. Which it did very well.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: Rage187

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777

Originally posted by: Rage187
it rendered differently back then.

Old SLI = One card rendered the even frames and the other rendered the odd frames.

New SLI = Each card renders a different area of the screen (Top/Bottom)

My knowledge of SLI is quite limited, but I thought AFR was every other frame?

per the SLI wiki:

3dfx's SLI design was the first attempt, in the consumer PC market, at combining the rendering power of two video cards. The cards were connected by a small ribbon cable inside the PC, and a VGA-to-VGA cable from card-to-card that shared graphics and synchronization information between the cards. Each card rendered alternating horizontal lines of pixels composing a frame.

looks like it render alternating lines and not frames.


Also, I owned a SLI rig back in 98 when it was introduced. I spent $600 for 2x12MB Voodoo2s from Software ETC. I wasn't expecting double the frame rate, I was expecting to run 1024x768 in Quake2. Which it did very well.

Those were the good days... Kinda funny you know, have you ever went back and installed a REALLY old game that you always remembered as being break through in the graphics department? Funny how horrible it looks now. The human brain is an interesting thing, it remembers the fact that it was awesome then but somehow is unable to update (remember, I guess) what the actual image looked like, thus when you finally see it, you realize just how horrible it was... Tangent, but it does boggle my mind...

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777

Those were the good days... Kinda funny you know, have you ever went back and installed a REALLY old game that you always remembered as being break through in the graphics department? Funny how horrible it looks now. The human brain is an interesting thing, it remembers the fact that it was awesome then but somehow is unable to update (remember, I guess) what the actual image looked like, thus when you finally see it, you realize just how horrible it was... Tangent, but it does boggle my mind...

Some people, realizing the above, have made the following observation:

A person who only plays games 1-2 years after they've been released could save a lot of money on hardware.

The hype of things new and different is expensive...like Nike-branded sneakers.