- This thing is so unbelievably cool.
Okay, sorry. Let's host the video.
Okay, quick: name the companies
that pioneered 3D graphics.
If you said Silicon Graphics, Pixar and 3dfx,
you're close,
but no.
Those guys merely adopted 3D.
Evans & Sutherland was born into it,
created by... (coughs)
Excuse me. Sorry, I don't do a good Bane voice.
Evans & Sutherland the company
was created by and named for
the guys who literally taught the classes
that shaped the careers of the people
who went on to create those other companies.
"But that's ancient history,"
I might hear you say.
"Show me something interesting."
Here's something interesting.
A dual-layered graphics card
with two different connectors on it,
that's old enough to still use DVI
and yet appears to have four GPUs on it,
predating Crossfire and Nvidia SLI.
Are you not interested?
(upbeat music)
What the heck are we lookin' at here?
What it appears to be is two completely separate,
independent graphics cards sandwiched,
and then if you look in between,
bridged together with two different connectors.
So this one uses AGP, or Accelerated Graphics Port,
and this one uses PCI.
No, not PCI Express. Old school PCI.
And what it all comes together to make
is Evans & Sutherland's last graphics card,
known as the SimFUSION OpenSim 6500q,
and what a beast it is.
Each of these cards has two Radeon 9800 XT graphics cores
for a total of four GPUs.
Guys, other than some weird Alienware thing,
this is before quad-SLI or quad-Crossfire existed,
so how did they do it?
As it turns out, after we posted on Twitter
about finding this card on eBay,
one of the former Evans & Sutherland engineers
who worked on this project took notice.
Layne Christensen, who, by the way,
is still working for the simulation arm of the company,
which is now owned by Collins Aerospace,
volunteered to offer us some background,
so we want to thank him very deeply
for taking the time out of his busy schedule
to demystify this for us.
- During my conversation with Layne,
he explained that he was part of a team
of about 10 hardware engineers and 5 software engineers
who worked together to build the cards,
which came in both a dual-GPU and quad-GPU configuration.
The quad-GPU config we have here
requires two separate cards,
and they communicate together using AGP 4x and PCI slots,
with a mid-board connection
that links them together here.
Layne wasn't sure exactly what bridge chip they used,
but I see an FPGA on the front of the card here
that seems to fit the bill.
As for why not six or eight GPUs,
this was actually the practical upper limit
that they could achieve using AGP and PCI alone.
Remember, while AGP and PCI Express are dedicated links,
or at least can be,
the old PCI standard shared its bandwidth
among all devices on the bus by design.
- According to Layne, ATI,
which is now Radeon Technologies Group,
had baked-in support for connecting
multiple GPUs together like this
in what was clearly a precursor to Crossfire,
even though they didn't offer it
to end users as a solution like just,
you know, plugging in a couple of cards.
Kinda makes sense, because no motherboards that I'm aware of
existed with multiple AGP slots.
But hey, why not offer it since you're working on it
to a third-party partner
who's trying to build a custom solution?
I mean, they don't really do that kinda stuff anymore,
but that was something that ATI fully endorsed
and even offered support for at the time.
By the way, speaking of the past, get subscribed.
We're gonna be building a PC from 10 years ago
and comparing it to brand-new.
You won't wanna miss it.
Now, as for Evans & Sutherland,
you guys might think, "Well, gee,
if they're gonna go and build this thing,
why don't they just sell it?
Why couldn't I buy one of these?
Why have I never seen one of these?"
The truth is these cards weren't available
to just anyone on the open market.
SimFUSION was their simulator platform at the time,
and as best as I can tell,
a prospective customer would be looking at buying a 25U
or even a full-height 40U rack
of five to nine node PCs configure with these,
all connected together as a cluster
with a common sync for both output and the render buffers.
Now, as you can see,
unfortunately we don't have five or even two of these,
but Anthony did manage to put together this test bench
based on the same hardware configuration,
using specifications from Layne and the user manual.
Wait, is this thing using all solid-state caps?
- [Anthony] That would make sense.
- Wow. That was like, very high-end shiz back then!
- Back then, all-solid-state caps was a little bit,
mm, unusual.
This, actually, high-end Intel server board
used caps that were part of the capacitor plague.
I actually had to recap the board
before it would work.
- We're just gonna have to pretend
that we're using proper cooler mounts here.
Don't overthink it.
Let's just throw the card in here and...
Oh, right, a two-slot card. (grunts)
Had to kinda push on that pretty hard.
And take a nice cold drink to take our mind off
at LTTstore.com.
(Linus laughs)
Power on our switch. Let's do moment of truth.
(fans whirring roughly) Whoa!
Yep, well, there's you're...
There's your Thermaltake bearings...
Yeah, 17 years later. (laughs)
To be clear, I'm not actually blaming Thermaltake for that.
That's just what happens to bearings
over the course of 17 years.
- [Anthony] Especially for something that would've been on
24/7 for a long time.
- [Linus] Num Lock's working. No display output yet though.
- There's an interesting idiosyncrasy
with this card, actually.
Due to the way they had to, I guess,
do like double-wide and even triple-wide resolutions,
they disabled certain other resolutions
in the BIOS of the card,
so it won't actually display text mode
or even, I think, VGA mode.
It has to be 800x600 or above.
So you're not gonna get anything over there right now.
- Until I do!
Is that a Windows XP desktop that I'm lookin' at, baby?
- That's what it ran on. (clears throat)
I put on my mask again.
- You guys might be wondering,
"Where on Earth did you find a driver
for a card like this?
Some Russian FTP?"
Good guess, but actually, no.
We scoured the internet and were not able
to find any working driver.
Thankfully, Layne actually had one
lying around on an old drive, and presumably
got his employer's permission to fire it over to us
so we could do something that a SimFUSION 6500
probably never did:
run games.
What should we try first?
I mean, 3DMark 2001 SE is what I'm sort of leaning towards.
Or maybe some good old-fashioned AquaMark?
Is that still around?
- [Anthony] I don't know. I didn't download it.
- I don't know if I wanna plug an XP machine
into our network.
- [Anthony] It was plugged into the network
for a while there, but it's XP Service Pack 4,
like the Unofficial Service Pack 4, so it's fully patched.
- All right.
Man, this is not a fast computer, sir.
- [Anthony] No, it is not.
- What is this? Single-core...
Single core with Hyper-Threading, oh yeah!
Four threads, baby! Mm, yeah!
Four threads!
High school me would've thought
this was amazingly sexy to look at.
- [Anthony] Oh yeah.
Just even seeing multiple graphs in Task Manager
was like the most trippy thing.
- Okay, here we go.
(Linus laughs)
Oh no!
Wow! Okay.
In fairness to the card, though...
I mean, it's running.
Wow. Even the loading screens are
a little broken.
- [Anthony] It's worth pointing out that
all of Evans & Sutherland's simulation stuff
was OpenGL-based.
They didn't really qualify the card at all for Direct3D.
The GPUs themselves are Direct3D 9 compatible,
but four of them?
It might be a bit hit-or-miss.
- I remember this nature demo looking so impressive to me.
I was like, "Wow!
There's so many leaves on the trees."
Man, I'm trying to find a 9800 XT
3DMark 2001 run to compare against,
and these old websites have not aged well.
Hey, there we go!
Okay, so at
1024x768,
a single 9800 XT managed
16,800 points.
Let's try AquaMark.
Oh man. This too.
It just brings back so many memories.
This is like pre-me-making-videos.
This is like me literally sitting in my basement
or my girlfriend's room,
you know, tuning my overclock
one megahertz at a time or whatever
and staring at this, checking for artifacts.
Lemme tell ya, if I ever saw it look like this,
I'd be like, "Oh no!
Off, everything off!" and turn that overclock down.
That's not the issue right now though.
And that's the massive overdraw,
was the big explosion at the end.
9 FPS. 8.6 FPS.
8.5!
AquaMark 3. 44,262 with an average FPS of 44.26.
Now, this isn't coming up right now,
and my Num Lock's not even working.
I think the system may have crashed.
But it's pretty fair to say
that we did not average 42 FPS,
so from a Direct3D gaming perspective,
buying four 9800 XTs is actually worse
than buying one 9800 XT.
Let's try something OpenGL.
Here's something I don't really get.
Why is it that the two 9800 XTs
in the middle of the sandwich
are the ones that don't have fans?
- [Anthony] It's possible that it was designed
for case airflow.
- If that's the case,
then we should probably put a fan on this poor thing
'cause it might be cooking in there.
I wonder if that's why we're getting so many artifacts.
We need a bigger fan.
Well, not bigger,
but definitely more powerful.
Aw! Stop!
- [Anthony] Should we have grills on our blowies?
- [Linus] Absolutely, we should.
These are a finger-removal hazard waiting to happen.
Ow!
- You okay? - I pinched my tummy.
(Linus and Anthony laugh)
- [Anthony] I've done that so many times.
- [Linus] Ow!
Whoa!
Settle down there, buddy! (fan screaming)
Oh yeah. We got airflow now, boys!
All right, benchmark time.
Dammit!
We're gonna leave it on anyway though,
because having the card cooled properly
is gonna be a factor for our last test:
"Unreal Tournament" '99 Game of the Year Edition.
Now this is an actual OpenGL game,
so this is what the card was...
Well, I'm not gonna say tuned for,
it wasn't made to run games, but
their simulators did use OpenGL.
Oh my god, I can't remember how to move in this game.
No!
No, I suck!
Aw, no!
I don't understand this FPS counter.
Okay, it's frame times, not FPS.
So we're anywhere between three
and eight milliseconds per frame.
Probably we're running around 150,
160 FPS, I would say.
- Sounds about right. We're at 1280x1024.
- Oh, come on! Just die!
Okay, if I can't manage to get a kill
with the rocket launcher, I don't deserve to...
(fan whining)
All right, I can't deal with this anymore.
Ah, my headache.
We couldn't find a professional review discussing this,
but here we go, here's a Rage3D.com thread
where someone complains that in "UT",
whenever there's dynamic lighting
their 9800 Pro drops from 100 FPS average to 40 FPS.
So that would seem to indicate
that if we're over 100 FPS here,
then at least we're doing better than a single 9800 Pro.
Okay.
So that's not four times the performance,
but it's better than a kick in the teeth.
Of course, as I've said before,
gaming was really not the point of it,
and the enterprise-grade functionality,
like being able to sync together many of these
running in many systems across an entire rack,
was really what Evans & Sutherland's customers were after.
Here's a fun thing, though. Check this out.
I Alt-Tabbed out of the game
and we got this really weird
sort of interleavy pattern on the desktop.
- The card was able to be set up in multiple different ways
as far as how it renders the screen itself,
so as Linus Alt-Tabbed here,
he ended up with these strips.
It seems to indicate that we were looking at
a kind of line-based rendering mechanism right now.
Otherwise, it could be split up into quadrants,
or alternating the swap chain as each card
just kinda renders a frame
and just kinda keeps going like that.
- What's especially cool about that
is that those rendering techniques
are actually the same ones that are still used
for multi-GPU setups today,
which I guess leads us to why the 6000 series
was both the first and last of its kind.
Layne says that after the development of this card,
PCI Express enabled just off-the-shelf solutions
for single- or even multi-GPU setups
that made this kind of engineering totally unnecessary.
So for how long this thing was relevant
and how expensive it must have been,
I count myself lucky to have one,
Thanks for watching, guys.
If you're looking for something else
kind of historical to watch,
maybe go check out my video on Intel's
previous dedicated GPU project, Larrabee.
We unfortunately weren't able to get that one working,
but we did get a chance to, you know,
at least try to power it on,
and talk to one of the engineers
who worked on that project as well,
so a very informative little video.