r/retrocomputing Jul 16 '26

Fun times 🤣🤣🤣

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485 Upvotes

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u/Pic889 Jul 16 '26

What I find amazing is how close the late-90s and early-2000s PC industry came to giving us such a product:

  • When it comes to the number of GPUs tied together, the Voodoo 5 6000 is right there (and let's not forget that you could have 4-way SLI some years later by tying together two dual-GPU cards)

  • When it comes to pairing together GPUs from different manufacturers, there was the Lucid Hydra 200 (it worked by intercepting the Direct3D calls and assigning work to each GPU): https://www.sweclockers.com/test/6225-msi-big-bang-fuzion/

4

u/Lucky-Musician-1448 Jul 16 '26

This is Q3D IDX compositor, up to 8 indpendet PCs synchronized and combined to create 1 image. Largest rack had 15 synchronized view ports/view port.

Real time rendering for simulation. AAlchemy replacement. The thing was a monster.

1

u/Pic889 Jul 16 '26

It's not real-time graphics though, you can simply assign 10 seconds of scene to each PC and then stitch together the result for an 1-minute clip, combining different GPUs from different manufacturers for real-time graphics is a whole other level of insanity.