3Dfx v2.0

[Lord_Vyper]

Asus recently released a new video card. No big deal, right?
Well, this card is a little bit different then your average video card.
It's 2 cards in one.

I'm sure most who frequent here are aware of SLI and Crossfire. These technologies take 2 cards, mesh them together, and deliver better performance then a single card.
Asus has take this a step further, taking 2 nVidia 7800GT GPUs, and mounting them on 1 physical card. [H]ardOCP link (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTQy).
As the review states, 2 7800GTs = 1 7800GTX 512. We already knew this from several other reviews pitting 2 physical 7800GTs in SLI against a single 7800GTX 512. The interesting part is that there wasn't any appreciable loss or gain in performance with mounting both GPUs on a single card. Chalk one up for Asus' R&D department.

As the title suggests, this feels eerily familiar to anyone who was looking at hardware in the mid 90s.
A company called 3Dfx was the first to make 3D accelleration chips for computers, and eventually they hit a stumbling block in GPU development, and were unable to make a newer/faster GPU. Their first answer? SLI. Hook 2 video cards together, and you'll get more performance! Downside was that each of those cards cost over $400. So, it never caught on. Hmm...
3Dfx's next idea was to meld 2 cards together. nVidia & Dell recently unveiled this (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=195). 2 cards on 1 PCIe interface...
The last gasp of 3Dfx was to do away with multiple cards, and just plug more GPUs onto 1 card directly. Wait.. where have I seen this before?

Everything old is new again....

[Fozzik]

Well, the two GPUs on one card has been around for a while. I'm pretty sure I talked about it and showed pictures from last year's E3 or one of the other shows. There are a couple other companies besides Asus who have been doing it for a while. The fact that the performance is just like SLI shouldn't really be a suprise, if I remember correctly they are really just using SLI to get the two chips to work together... so the only real difference is that the two are sharing the same memory instead of having their own.

It also shouldn't be much of a suprise that things are taking a similar course at Nvidia right now, since Nvidia bought 3Dfx several years ago, including all their technology and a lot of their engineers. I don't think 3Dfx's downfall was because of SLI, I think it had more to do with the engineers ;). Look at what they did at Nvidia... we have them to thank for the stinky FX series a couple years back.

The biggest difference between 3Dfx's scan line interleave, and Nvidia's scaleable link interface, is PCI vs. PCI-Express. PCI made it possible to link to video cards together, but PCI was never intended to offer the kind of bandwidth that two 3D video cards would need (considering it was shared bandwidth, and also probably had at least three other devices on the same shared bus).

This time around, SLI has PCI-Express...which is a ton better suited for dual video cards. Each slot has it's own separate bandwidth, and there's tons of it to go around. Nvidia's SLI has been an incredible success compaired to 3Dfx's back in the day, and it certainly hasn't gotten any cheaper. Just about nobody predicted that SLI would catch on the way it has, and it still boggles the mind sometimes how much money people are willing to pay.

Dual video cards are here to stay, at least for the next year or two. It's just been too popular to get rid of, and it has to be a great cash producer for the graphics manufacturers. Why sell one overpriced card, when you can sell two!? :D

Whether you are talking about dual chips on one board, or dual video cards, I still feel like the price/performance/features are almost never worth it. If the price ends up being the same, and the performance is similar, I would always go for a single faster card than two slower cards. Just my opinion, though.

[tennex]

Interesting, my Holiday 2005 maximum PC magazine would give the same credit to Gigabyte for doing this with the Geforce 6800GS. It also ran a few benchmarks comparing the card to one a single geforce 6800, 2 operating in sli, and one single 7800 card. It was only out benchmarked slightly in 2 different areas than the single 7800 card. One being 1 FPS in HALO difference. There complaints was the price tag and the weight of the card being way to much to just have one expansion screw holding it up. At any rate, it was about 50 dollars cheaper at the time of the press release to buy it than 2 cards running in sli. Thanks for posting this vyper, I was wondering if anyone was going to do the same thing with the 7 series. I figured it would be gigabyte. Any links to any benchmarks vs 2 cards in sli? Any known cons yet? Like maybe weight and price tag?