Hi all I have been wondering since this is the drivers section and so on and that we are always interested in new goals, this idea may not seem so new hence Nvidia & ATi are using softwarematic Multi chip partually via their drivers, I had this thought why not 3dfx cards?

For example you have a Voodoo5 5500 AGP as main VGA and a Voodoo5 5500 PCI as slave card alongside the 5500 AGP.

In theory it would be possible for both to communicate in SLI via some hybrid driver, though can such a driver actually be made?

Just something I'd like to know, hence we are all interested in new things maybe this idea isn't such a bad idea after all, as for people with a 6000, they could add 2 5500 PCI's to enable 8 way SLI over 3 cards for example, it may not be as powerfull as 8 way SLI via the hardware mode but on the other hand every extra piece of perfomance added even softwarematically is never a bad thing right?

If this is possible to implent in a driver who would have the courage to make something like this SFFT , AmigaMerlin or Raziel64?  

Only thing remains, there has been no-one that has attempted such a thing because they never felt like doing it or so, shame really...

If 3dfx gamers complain that they want new-gen games like Doom3, Quake 4 as HL2 to run on their cards, as the results are as always sluggish, now if you could combine powers with multiple V5's I am quite sure these new-gen games would do alot better.

The thing is are the 3dfx programmers that make us drivers, planned to something really new like this, if people keep saying it is possible in theory, why don't they make it possible just to prove us it is possible in theory as in reality! 

nVidia's SLI isn't all software. Note, that nVidia GPUs have a hardware-based unit inside their GPU die to handle SLI communications and of course to control the little bus, which runs over what we know as "SLI bridge". I guess ATi also has dedicated logic inside their chips to handle crossfire, dunno about S3.

To answer your question (as far as I'm able to that is): Yes, this is in theory possible. It wouldn't even cost too much bandwidth, because the primary VSA card would sit on the AGP, whereas further "Slaves" would sit on another PCI bus.

Some workstation mainboards even have more than one PCI bus, so the PCI slots may be divided over 2 buses, giving additional bandwidth, as long as you plug each Voodoo on its own bus.

Actually, intercommunication between the VSA chips is not done in some super-fast proprietary way. It is simply that: Another PCI bus implemented on the Voodoo card itself. For the v5 5500, the master VSA acts as PCI bridge to the second one, for the v5 6000, the HiNT HB1-SE66 acts as bridge to provide a PCI Bus supporting four devices on the card (hence, four VSA-100). So, it is all just PCI, no fancy proprietary 3dfx stuff anywhere. The rest is handled by the driver, as far as I know.

Now, for your given example: What I think can NOT be done is relable the 5500's master VSA chips to slaves for the 6000. In that case, the primary VSA-100 on the 6000 would be master, all other VSAs in the whole system would be slaves to that one single master. I guess that does not work. Maybe it's a driver thing, but such a modification might even require BIOS changes, maybe it is even a hardware limitation (quite likely even).

So, you would probably have to create another pure software layer, that combines the VSA cards, does performance evaluation on each complete card (to determine, which card should render larger portions of the screen, and which slower cards should render smaller portions), and then does "Software SLI" with them.

Such a solution would be comparable to what Metabyte tried to do with PGC ("Parallel Graphics Configuration").

The problem with our fellow 3dfx driver coders is, that (as far as i know - feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) they always just worked on the 3dfx codebase, patching it, improving it, fixing it. But developing something as groundbreakingly new as "softwarematic SLI" or PGC is extremely more difficult than patching an existing (maybe even well-documented) codebase.

It might just be far too much to accomplish. What you would need are a few full-time coders working 8 hours a day for maybe a few months to even get a prototype working in a single game or test engine with something like this. Plus, unified framebuffers might not work so easily with such a solution, wasting the memory usage advantage when scaling up the number of VSA's (6000 uses less memory per VSA than 5500, because each VSA only has a quarter of the framebuffer to store in its mem patch instead of half).

Bottom line: Maybe I'm wrong in some of my assumptions, but what i truly think that YES, this can be done, and NO, it will most probably not be done, because it is an extremely hard problem to solve.

Well, first, nVidia/ATi have the SLI/CF bridge and then, the communication between the chips has been designed to scale farther from ground up. So, it's just by design.

3dfx had to deal with the AGP port, so multiple high-end cards would not have been possible at all (only 1 AGP Port). Plus, at that time, lots of people were complaining about the additional power requirements of v5 5500 cards, so adding even MORE cards might not have given them a very good reputation.

nVidia has a serial interface, that works like a network topology (PCIe..) with Hubs instead of bridged buses (PCI), so i guess, that makes multi-card "Scalable Link Interface" a bit easier to handle and scale than "Scanline InterLeave"...

hmm oke, but when we look @ Quantum3D's AA5 setups these were 2 way SLI setups of a total of 16 VSA-100's with either 32 ro 64MB per chip, then I'm like why not use Voodoo2 style instead as Q3D did with their AAlchemy 81.xx series?

Okay I know that Quantum3D is a total different sector but techwise there isn't much difference.

Maybe Dual 5500 PCI's instead heh, ah well someday I hope for sucha  driver to evolve even if it would take a year or two, it would give us more headroom as game support may take us

Yeaps exactly hehe T-Buffer amazed alot of us when that Q3A Motion Blur demo was shown on a rev.A1 1500 V6K @ the Comdex 2000 and now today we can still envy that awesome experience.
it is a shame that everything went NV's way back then, imho 3dfx did have the upper hand tech wise, okay not saying that S3T&L is a bad thing, yeah S3 invented it NV was only the first to ahave put it to use with their GeForce2 GTS heh.

But yeah as you said Motion Blur & Depth of Field Blur are being used today is a hard fact, even Soft Shadows & Soft Reflections are bing used and come to think of it, 3dfx was very ahead of every VGA vendor for it's time, I eman we are speaking Q4 1999, the first 5500 PCB's were from week 44 year 1999 and they had T-Buffer  

Sometimes it is very strange how things packed out, indeed that Naplam was delayed to much, if it hit the market before the NV10 aka GeForce 256, things would been alot different and maybe 3dfx would of been around even today.

I would love to see software SLI, but like Grandadmiral said, who is goint to do it? As far as I know, most are enthusiasts, but not to the level needed to make this work, and completely rewrite most of the driver.

Quote:


The matter of the fact is unfortunately, that quite quickly after the Voodoo 2, 3dfx didn't have much on nVidia at all tech wise.

Imho nVidia was already showing it's direction and supremacy after the TNT2, questionably the TNT as well.

I know that viewpoint is probably not very popular on a 3dfx forum, but nVidia did turn out to be one of the biggest innovators in the industry, and has been so for a long time.

Tim wrote on 14.03.09 at 01:45:26:


Rampage (with SAGE) was slated to come out after Voodoo II- Voodoo 3 and Naplam were mere placeholders.

Feature creap and Banshee delayed Rampage.

VSA-100 would have never exsisted if Rampage was on time.

@ Gdonovan
Your speak exactly the perfect details! indeed if Rampy was ontime VSA-100 & VSA-100 were never needed and indeed there would of never existed.

VSa-100 was actually more of a Fill the gap sollution, as to expand the develpment of the VSA-200 which actually was planned after Voodoo2 aka SST-2.

But hence the massive delays Banshee & Avenger were added to fill in the gaps and as for Naplam, & Daytone these twe had Rampage tech like Rotated Grid Super Sampled FSAA, Motion Blur, Soft Shadows, Soft Reflections and depth Of Field, these techs were actually taken from the Rampage design.

But the sad thing was, that these techs were hardly supported hence Rotated Grid Super Sampled FSAA but for the trest left to be unused in the main ames that followed.

Okat that there was a Q3A demo that utilized Motion Blue did show what Motion Blur could do but it never was applied to most games, Descent 3 is one of the very few that supports 3dfx Motion Blur.

This can be seen as how the robots around, Motion Blur can be seen very well.
as I have tested with my Voodoo5 5000 PCI here:


As you can see the cop bot does show a clear Motion Blur effect as it sways to the right

I used reso 1024 x 768 x16 in 3dfx Glide + FSAA x4 & LOD Bias -4 with Descent 3 ver 1.5 Beta + PyroMania 1.5 Full, for the 5000 PCI I sued SFFT Alpha 41 modified by ps47 under Win2k Pro + SP4 , yes 3dfx SLI works on the 5000 CPI under any NTFS OS.

@ Nitrox Infinity

Absolutely correct NV didn't really have new designs all what they did is modify the older designs so actually they never had something new under the sun.

I truly agree with you mate.

@ everyone,
I had a few beers tonight  So the typo's do declaire their state hrr hrr.