DOUBLE TROUBLE

Whatever happened to MULTI-GPU setups?

- Phil Iwaniuk

This is the way the world ends”, wrote TS Eliot in his 1925 poem The Hollow Men. “Not with a bang but a whimper.” It’s hard to say if Eliot was writing directly about Nvidia and AMD’s support for multi-GPU setups or speaking more allegorically. Perhaps we’ll never know. What we can all roundly agree on is that Eliot lands on a truism when it comes to technology in general: there’s never an announcement. Yesterday’s Next Big Thing is instead quietly escorted out of the building and stuffed into a bin away from prying eyes.

We didn’t get any press releases confirming the formal demise of 3D TVs in the mid-2010s, we’ll get no such PR when VR dies in 2030 (fight me), and neither SLI nor Crossfire got the official state funerals they deserved when, at some point in the last five years, multi-GPU PC builds simply stopped being a thing.

The concept is an old one. Even in the days before 3DFX was the last word in PC gaming graphics hardware, before the Nvidia buyout, the company behind Voodoo was finding ways to run two of its cards in parallel. Voodoo 2 introduced scan-line interleave (SLI) support in February 1998. For context, that’s three months before Unreal came out, and only a few weeks after the discovery of penicillin.

To the consumer, it worked just like later iterations of SLI and Crossfire did: you placed two identical graphics cards in your motherboard’s PCI slots, and connected them with a proprietary ribbon cable. That enabled your two Voodoo 2s to process graphical rendering tasks in parallel for faster performance. That was the theory.

EARLY PROBLEMS