3dfx Sli?

3DFX SLI?
I seem to recall back in the day that some Voodoo cards would allow you to run two cards in tandem to increase their capability. I picked up the voodoo 5500 AGP a year ago and love it with Prophecy and SO. Now with HCI coming out with a patch for Prophecy I go to wondering whether the 5500 could run in tandem with another 5500? I think there’s a 5500 PCI out there? Has any one ever tried that?

Thanks,
Shades
 
SLI was most used on the Voodoo2. The Voodoo2 on it's own could only support 800x600 fully accelerated. With SLI you can run in 1024x768.
As far as I know SLI relies on identical cards, which is why NVidia saved it after buying out 3DFX until PCI-E came out. It can't work between an AGP card and a PCI card as they run at different speeds and behave in different ways.
If it's an AGP 5500 you've got (A 128MB model, or a 64mb?) then the multiple GPUs on the card actually do a kind of SLI internally anyway. Besides in GLIDE you're not going to get much faster and you really won't need to. Try the WCSO hires patch in glide mode to see what I mean. I run it in 1024x768 on my twin Voodoo2s and it looks very pretty indeed.
 
Unfortunately, it is not possible with the Voodoo4/5-series to combine two separate boards in the same system for commensurate performance gains, unlike 3dfx's initial SLI foray with Voodoo2 and now nVIDIA's significantly improved version (GeForce 6 series and later) as well as ATi's CrossFire (X800/X1K).

With it's Voodoo4/5-series products (VSA-100), 3dfx leveraged the SLI branding made popular with multi-card Voodoo2 products in two PCI slots connected via dongle, into a single card, multi-gpu (1x-4x per board) product. The 4-gpu version (Voodoo 5 6000) was never mass-produced, although a handful of various (some working) prototype revisions are in the hands a few tech enthusiasts and occasionally pop up on E-Bay for a king's ransom.

3dfx integrated the SLI capability to the board level with Voodoo4/5, due to the prevalence of the AGP specification for high-end graphics cards at the time, which limited any multi-card setup due to the differing frequencies and bandwidth between the AGP and PCI buses -- getting two cards to communicate over two different buses with different latencies, etc was not viable at the time.

However, MetaByte (a popular Voodoo2 manufacturer) were working on a system called StepSister, that promised to solve the problem I described above, i.e. allow an AGP and PCI to be utilised in a SLI-like fashion. Unfortunately, Wicked3D pulled out of the extremely competitive graphics market in May 1999, a few months after previewing their StepSister technology. A few years later, Alienware spent considerable resources developing a similar system, only to be displaced by nVIDIA's improved SLI implementation with the arrival of high-end PCI Express penetration in late 2004.

As far as playing Prophecy today, any graphics card released in the past 6 or 7 years should have no problem playing the game and with a decent GLide wrapper, such as Zeckensack's, the game can be played in it's native API. The increase in GPU processing power, complexity and parallelisation over the past decade is quite astounding -- 3dfx's SST-1 (Voodoo), fabricated almost 10 years ago comprised 1-million transistors compared with ATi's R580 (X1900XT/XTX) which tops current complexity at 384-million transistors!

HCL's upcoming patch for even higher resolutions and widescreen support will probably require a more recent graphics card if you push the resolution up, but even with a typical card today, Prophecy should be playable at the extremes with high levels of AA and AF, as well as extras such as Adaptive AA(ATi R3xx/X800/X1K-series)/Transparency AA(GeForce 7-series), which improves AA on alpha textures, although I wouldn't think there would be many or even any in an engine of Vision's vintage.

Cheers,


BrynS
 
Thanks BrynS and Terroshak I figured it wouldn’t work but hoping it would. I’d LOVE to play with one of those 6000’s though.
 
I think the overall point here is that with any modern card today and the glide wrapper, you can get everything the 6000 would give you and more.
 
Shades, I doubt you'd be too impressed with the 6000. It can do wonderful things with FSAA and motion blur effects, but 3DFX didn't include a transform and lighting engine, something that so many games use today. These means that even a bog-standard geforce2mx will outperform the Voodoo5 6000 on anything using T&L (Which these days is anything using D3D!).
Also it's a MASSIVE card. Some people have found it won't fit in the case!
I've gone down the route of having a geforce for my AGP card, but I still keep my SLI'd Voodoo2s in the case for all those games whose only 3D support is GLIDE. :D
 
Actually my question is if the new hires patches need Glide to look their best like the original game did.

(my curiosity is partially piqued by the plastic-sealed Voodoo 3-series at my new workplace. For sale.)
 
terroshak said:
I've gone down the route of having a geforce for my AGP card, but I still keep my SLI'd Voodoo2s in the case for all those games whose only 3D support is GLIDE. :D

That’s what I use it for. I have an old machine with the 5500 just for playing those old games and another machine gust for the new games.
 
Chernikov said:
Actually my question is if the new hires patches need Glide to look their best like the original game did.

Well, the new patch doesn't look like it will realy add to D3D image quality, if that's what you're asking. The game physically looks better and has a few improved effects when in Glide mode, whether it be via 3dfx card or wrapper.
 
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