A long time ago in our galaxy ... there was a lot more manufacturers of discrete graphics processors, than now. One of them was the company 3dfx Interactive, and despite the fact, that the company is long gone, enthusiasts still continue to experiment with its graphics cards. for example, Ross "TheeRaccoon" Tregemba (Ross Tregemba) I decided to try to run Voodoo on a bunch of eight GPUs 2 the game Half-Life.
Voodoo GPU 2 was presented in the distant 1998 year and became the first GPU, supported by SLI technology, to create bundles of multiple GPUs, which was then actively used by NVIDIA. And with the advent of SLI, many manufacturers began to offer graphics accelerators with Voodoo pairs 2.
Quantum3D was among them., which not only released a “dual-headed” video card on Voodoo2, but also the Mercury system, which combines four such video cards together. The result is a system with eight Voodoo2 GPUs, as well as a special controller, which makes them work together, similar to a modern SLI bridge.
And just on such a system, originally intended for professional workstations and “heavy” calculations, enthusiast and started the game Half-Life. In fact, Only one Quantum3D Obsidian video card was involved in creating the picture. 2 200SBi with a pair of Voodoo2, while the other three were responsible for full-screen anti-aliasing. At the same time, the video cards provided very high FPS, but exact numbers are not given.
Interesting, that an enthusiast was able to combine different versions of Quantum3D Obsidian video cards 2 200SBi. On one of them, GPUs operate at a frequency 125 MHz, and on the other three - 100 MHz. Each video card has 24 MB of video memory, that is, according to 12 MB on GPU and 96 MB in total. Overall it turned out to be quite an interesting experiment., although not of any practical use.
