SOME TIME ago Nvidia announced what it heralded as a technological breakthrough named SLI capable of outperforming any other rival trying to conquer the crown of 3D graphics. But is it really something new as Nvidia claims? I don't think so. History reveals the truth. 3dfx used SLI, which then stood for Scan Line Interleave, to boost the performance of Voodoo2 cards. You could buy a single Voodoo2 PCI for starters, with 8 or 12MB of memory on-board, and pair it with a second one to achieve double performance.
The two cards were connected with passthrough VGA cables eventually to the monitor, and a special 40 pin cable physically connecting them. The Voodoo 2 SLI was very popular in its day, due to an easy and simple solution. 3dfx continued using this technology alongside with Quantum 3d constructing multichip cards for the military.
View: The full story
News source: The Inq
