This MONSTER Video Card has 4 GPUs... and it's from 2004!

This thing is so unbelievably cool. Okay, sorry. . Okay, quick: name the companies that pioneered 3D graphics. If you said SiliconGraphics, 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'tdo 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 createthose 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? I'm interested in telling you about today's sponsor, Private Internet Access. PIA is fast, affordable, and you can get it (snaps fingers) right now through the linkin the video description. (upbeat music) What the heck are we lookin' at here? What it appears to be istwo completely separate, independent graphics cards sandwiched, and then if you look in between, bridged together withtwo different connectors. So this one uses AGP, orAccelerated 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'slast graphics card, known as the SimFUSION OpenSim 6500q, and what a beast it is.

 Each of these cards has twoRadeon 9800 XT graphics cores for a total of four GPUs. Guys, other than someweird Alienware thing, this is before quad-SLIor quad-Crossfire existed, so how did they do it? As it turns out, afterwe 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 thesimulation 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 outof 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 engineersand 5 software engineers who worked together to build the cards, which came in both a dual-GPUand quad-GPU configuration. The quad-GPU config we have here requires two separate cards, and they communicate togetherusing AGP 4x and PCI slots, with a mid-board connection that links them together here. Layne wasn't sure exactlywhat bridge chip they used, but I see an FPGA on thefront of the card here that seems to fit the bill. As for why not six or eight GPUs, this was actually thepractical upper limit that they could achieveusing AGP and PCI alone. Remember, while AGP and PCIExpress 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 aprecursor 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 nomotherboards that I'm aware of existed with multiple AGP slots. But hey, why not offer itsince you're working on it to a third-party partner who's trying to build a custom solution? I mean, they don't reallydo that kinda stuff anymore, but that was somethingthat ATI fully endorsed and even offered support for at the time. By the way, speaking ofthe past, get subscribed. We're gonna be buildinga 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 simulatorplatform at the time, and as best as I can tell, a prospective customer wouldbe looking at buying a 25U or even a full-height 40U rack of five to nine node PCsconfigure with these, all connected together as a cluster with a common sync for bothoutput and the render buffers. Now, as you can see, unfortunately we don't havefive or even two of these, but Anthony did manage toput together this test bench based on the same hardware configuration, using specifications fromLayne and the user manual. Wait, is this thing usingall solid-state caps? - [Anthony] That would make sense. -

Wow. That was like, veryhigh-end shiz back then! - Back then, all-solid-statecaps was a little bit, mm, unusual. This, actually, high-endIntel server board used caps that were partof 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 propercooler 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 colddrink 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 actuallyblaming Thermaltake for that. That's just what happens to bearings over the course of 17 years. - [Anthony] Especially forsomething 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 eventriple-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 getanything over there right now.

- Until I do! Is that a Windows XP desktopthat 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 olddrive, and presumably got his employer's permissionto fire it over to us so we could do somethingthat a SimFUSION 6500 probably never did: run games. What should we try first? I mean, 3DMark 2001 SE is whatI'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 Iwanna plug an XP machine into our network. - [Anthony] It wasplugged into the network for a while there, butit's XP Service Pack 4, like the Unofficial ServicePack 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 multiplegraphs 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'ssimulation stuff was OpenGL-based. They didn't really qualifythe card at all for Direct3D. The GPUs themselves areDirect3D 9 compatible, but four of them? It might be a bit hit-or-miss. - I remember this nature demolooking 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 literallysitting 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 eversaw it look like this, I'd be like, "Oh no! Off, everything off!"

 andturn 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 withan 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 possiblethat it was designed for case airflow. - If that's the case, then we should probably puta fan on this poor thing 'cause it might be cooking in there. I wonder if that's why we'regetting so many artifacts. We need a bigger fan. Well, not bigger, but definitely more powerful. Aw! Stop!

 - [Anthony] Should we havegrills on our blowies? - [Linus] Absolutely, we should. These are a finger-removalhazard 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" '99Game 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 rememberhow 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 professionalreview 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 from100 FPS average to 40 FPS. So that would seem to indicate that if we're over 100 FPS here, then at least we're doingbetter 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 synctogether many of these running in many systemsacross 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 setup in multiple different ways as far as how it rendersthe screen itself, so as Linus Alt-Tabbed here, he ended up with these strips. It seems to indicatethat we were looking at a kind of line-basedrendering mechanism right now. Otherwise, it could besplit 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 sameones that are still used for multi-GPU setups today, which I guess leads usto why the 6000 series was both the first and last of its kind.

Layne says that after thedevelopment of this card, PCI Express enabled justoff-the-shelf solutions for single- or even multi-GPU setups that made this kind ofengineering totally unnecessary. So for how long this thing was relevant and how expensive it must have been, I count myself lucky to have one, even if I did apparentlygrossly overpay for it. What's in your online security toolkit? Adding a VPN lets you mask your IP and encrypts traffic toand from your devices, and Private InternetAccess has reliable service with thousands of serversin dozens of countries. They offer no bandwidth caps, configurable encryption with a kill switch to keep you in control of your connection, and when combined with private browsing, PIA can make websites think you are in a different country. Try it out risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee at the link below. You can connect up to 10 devices at once with clients for Windows,macOS, iOS and Linux. What are you waiting for?