 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 3D effects, you're close, but no. Those guys merely adopted 3D. Evans and Sutherland was born into it. Created by, excuse me, sorry, I don't do a good Bane voice. Evans and 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, pre-dating Crossfire and Nvidia SLI. Are you not interested? I'm interested. What the heck are we looking 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 and Sutherland's last graphics card known as the SIMFusion OpenSIM 6500Q. And what a beast it is. Each of these cards has two Radeon 9800XT 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 and Sutherland engineers who worked on this project took notice. Lane 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 Lane, he explained that he was part of a team about 10 hardware engineers and five software engineers 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-bore connection that links them together here. Lane wasn't sure exactly what bridge chip they use, 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 Lane, 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 plugging in a couple of cards. Kind of 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 kind of 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, you know, 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 configured 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 Lane and the user manual. Wait, is this thing using all solid state caps? That would make sense. Wow, that was like very high end shoes back then. Back then, all solid state caps was a little bit unusual. This actually high end Intel server board used caps that were part of the capacitor playing. 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, two slot card, gotta push on that pretty hard and take a nice cold drink to take our mind off at lttstore.com. Power switch, just a moment of truth. Whoa. Yep, well there's your thermal take bearings at 17 years later. To be clear, I'm not actually blaming thermal take for that. That's just what happens to bearings over the course of 17 years. Especially for something that would have been on 24 seven for a long time. Num Locks 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 bias of the card. So it won't actually display text mode or even I think VGA mode. It has to be like 800 by 600 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 looking at, baby? That's what it ran up. 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 we're not able to find any working driver. Thankfully, Lane 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 SIM Fusion 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? I don't know, I didn't download it. I don't know if I wanna plug an XP machine into our network. It was plugged into the network for a while there but it's XP service pack four on the like the unofficial service pack four. So it's fully patched. All right, man, this is not a fast computer, sir. No, it is not. What is this? Single core with hyperthreading. Oh yeah, four threads, baby. Yeah, four threads. High school me would have thought this was amazingly sexy to look at. Oh yeah, like just even seeing multiple graphs in task manager was like the most trippy thing. Okay, here we go. Oh no. Wow, okay. In fairness to the card though, I mean, it's running. Wow, even the loading screens are a little broken. It's worth pointing out that all of Evans and Sutherland's simulation stuff was OpenGL based. They didn't really qualify the card at all for a direct 3D. The GPUs themselves are direct 3D nine compatible but for 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 like leaves on the trees. Man, I'm trying to find a 9,800 XT 3D Mark 2001 run to compare against and like these old websites have not aged well. Hey, there we go. Okay, so at 1024 by 768, a single 9,800 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 like my girlfriend's room, like, you know tuning my overclock one megahertz at a time or whatever. Like staring at this, checking for artifacts. Let me tell you, if I ever saw it look like this I'd be like, oh, oh, off, everything off turn that overclock down. That's not the issue right now though. And then that's the massive overdraw. This is the big explosion at the end. Nine 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 direct 3D gaming perspective buying 4,9800 XTs is actually worse than buying 1,9800 XT. Let's try something OpenGL. Here's something I don't really get. Why is it that the 2,9800 XTs in the middle of the sandwich are the ones that don't have fans? 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. Ah, stop. Should we have grills on our blowies? Absolutely, we should. These are a finger removal hazard waiting to happen. Ow! I pinched my tummy. I've done that so many times. Ow! Whoa, settle down there buddy. Oh yeah, we got airflow now boys. All right, benchmark time. Damn it! 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, it's a game. Their simulators did use OpenGL. I can't remember how to move in this game. No, no, I saw, ah, 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 1280 by 1024. Come on, just die! Okay, if I can't manage to get a kill with a rocket launcher, I don't deserve to. All right, I can't deal with this anymore. Oh, 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 is 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, that 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 and 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 like 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 kind of renders a frame and just kind of keep 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. Lane 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've been, I count myself lucky to have one, even if I did apparently grossly overpay for it. 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, Larabee. We unfortunately weren't able to get that one working, but we did get a chance to at least try to power it on and talk to one of the engineers who worked on that project as well. It's a very informative little video.