The YouTuber “Dawid Does Tech Stuff” bought an affordable gaming PC. The surprise is huge when he finally opens the PC.
The YouTube channel “Dawid Does Tech Stuff” regularly tests and buys strange hardware and components to review them on his channel. This time, Dawid purchased an old gaming PC from Alienware. The surprise is immense when he opens the PC. We have embedded Dawid’s video here for you:
12-year-old GPU with unique technology
What does he find in the computer? When Dawid opens the old gaming PC, he finds, to his great surprise, an Nvidia GTX 690. This is a graphics card that hit the market in April 2012 and is thus more than 12 years old. At the time, the GTX 690 was considered the fastest graphics card on the market and could also outperform AMD’s Radeon HD 6990. You can read about this with colleagues at ComputerBase.
However, what is special is not the age, but the layout of the GPU. Because the graphics card does not rely on just one graphics chip, but on two fully equipped chips on the board. This is notable because two chips are relatively rare and are not used at all today.
Micro stuttering as an annoying companion with dual graphics cards
Why are there no graphics cards with 2 chips today? This is primarily due to the phenomenon of “micro stuttering”: When you connect multiple graphics cards or chips to a computer, the chips have to synchronize the frames with each other. Micro stuttering occurs when every second frame takes significantly longer to compute than the first. This causes the game to run unevenly.
AMD and Nvidia both struggled for years to get micro stuttering under control. With the release of the GTX 690, things improved significantly, but the annoying stutters never completely disappeared. Eventually, individual chips became so fast that such dual systems no longer made sense.
In 2021, Nvidia put an end to the matter: They discontinued support for multiple graphics cards in one computer. Nvidia no longer offered profiles for the SLI mode. At AMD, it was already stated in 2017 that they saw no future in dual GPU technology (Crossfire).
Today, surprisingly, it is AMD technology that gives many old graphics cards a new lease on life. And graphics cards from Nvidia also benefit from this. More about this directly on MeinMMO: It was one of the best-selling graphics cards from Nvidia, and yet it is AMD that has significantly extended its lifespan in gaming
