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Introduction

When we look back at the short but storied history of consumer 3D acceleration we can pick out several defining moments. The first is the introduction of the Voodoo1, the early forerunner in the 3D card craze. Accelerating apps such as Tomb Raider and Quake, the Voodoo 1 was bar none, the most popular and coveted piece of computer equipment back in the day. Early competitors back then started catching up to the Voodoo 1, one of them being the infamous Nvidia RIVA128 which could rival the Voodoo 1 in speed, but was hampered by poor image quality. The introduction of the Voodoo 2 set the bar for a new generation of products. Not only did the Voodoo 2 more than double the performance of the Voodoo 1, 3dfx introduced the world to SLI - scan line interleave mode which would use not one but two Voodoo 2s in parallel to double performance. Maybe it was crushing the competition both in terms of games support and flat out performance that lulled 3dfx into a sense of security, but never again would 3dfx command such a performance lead. The Voodoo2 is arguably the pinnacle of 3dfx before its slow but steady fall into bankruptcy and obsolescence.

This last generation of video cards also provided huge jumps. Both Nvidia and ATi managed to roughly double their performance compared to the performance leaders of the previous generation. Nvidia proudly claimed that this was their largest performance jump between new architectures ever.

During E3, Alienware dropped the bomb on the online community with the announcement of their Video Array technology. Alienware along with Intel, developed a proprietary product that could take two PCI Express graphics cards from any company and have them work in parallel, similiar only to 3dfx's SLI as a dual videocard processing solution. Unfortunately, this particular implementation is only available through Alienware and reportedly there would be roughly 100 units a month available. This seemed like a major coup for Alienware at the time as it seemed unlikely that any other system integrator had the resources that Alienware did with the development of their Video Array.

Last week I got a cryptic message from Nvidia asking if I would be around the next day for a tech briefing- it was somewhat of a surprise as a new product from them was not expected; afterall the 6800 is still next to impossible to get a hold of in retail and it is still brand new as far as products go. The next day I received a call from the man, the legend himself, Brian Burke. Nvidia was bringing back SLI.