NVIDIA's SLI resurrects GPU teaming
Kickin' it old school—with 32 pipes
AS I WAS PREPARING our review of the new PCI Express stuff, fellow TR staffer Andy Brown dropped in to Damage Labs for a look at the new hardware. I showed him the PCI Express version of the GeForce 6800 GT, and he noted a funny connector on the top of the card. "That's the SLI connector," he joked. I responded with what I thought was the proper sarcasm. I mean, us old timers like to recall the days of the ancient 3dfx Voodoo 2 graphics cards, when 3D graphics on a home computer was still a new experience, and Voodoo 2 SLI ruled the graphics world.
Kickin' it old school—with 32 pipes
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SLI stood for "scan line interleave," which was 3dfx's means of distributing the workload between a pair of PCI graphics cards in order to boost performance. Stick a couple of Voodoo 2 cards into your box, connect them together, and one would literally draw the even-numbered scan lines on the screen while the other drew the odd-numbered lines. Since the Voodoo 2 was the fastest graphics card available on the PC during that time, owning a pair of them made a person Head Geek on the block. They would rip through Quake II like nothing else.
But us old timers knew those days wouldn't return. Our so I thought. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong, and Andy couldn't have been more right.
