My take on Nvidia SLI

7 years ago, 3DFX followed up the Voodoo success with Voodoo 2 SLI.
One board cost about $5-600 at first and was out of reach for most
gamers. I got a hold of a pair of used V2 cheap a few months later
from a distressed owner who was in dire need of some money. That was
the first time I played games in all 1024x768’s glory and was wowed by
it. But I sold off one board a few days later because two boards were
still too rich in price for me.



It wasn’t until TNT2 (or TNT1 Ultra) that Nvidia overtook the speed
crown from V2 SLI. How ironically Nvidia now is the one who brings
SLI back?



Yet if you consider these two iterations of SLI, you’ll see what made
the V2 SLI a success is not presented to the Nvidia case.



Every Mobo had two pci slots back then but we haven’t seen one PCI
express boards out on the market yet.



The difference between playing 800x600 and 1024x768 (V2 SLI) is huge
but not between playing 1280 x1024 and 1600x1200 (Nvidia SLI). Unless
you have a 21” monitor, playing games on 1600x1200 res makes the icons
too small.



The V2 is purely a 3D gaming board that couldn’t do anything else.
This Nvidia board is a full fledge board and Nvidia expects people to
buy an extra board just to play some 3D games at a slightly higher
resolution.



My take is the Nvidia SLI is not gonna fly. People are not be easily
wowed by new boards anymore, unlike we did back 7 years ago when 3Dfx
was the king, Thomas Pabst was a rookie tech reviewer and Anand la
Shrimp just celebrated the 2nd year anniversary of his website.



Well, those were the days.