The simplest way to make your PC games look better is to buy a better graphics card. If you already have the best graphics card money can buy (one of these, perhaps), the next step is to install a duplicate and make them work together. Most savvy PC users have a machine with a discrete graphics card, but adding a second or even third card and running them together can lead to a big performance boost in demanding PC games.
This job can also be a little tricky, though the process has gotten much easier in the past decade. Consumer-class multi-GPU graphics configurations date all the way back to 1998 when 3dfx debuted the Voodoo 2 and the accompanying SLI, or Scan-Line Interleave technology. In those days, when two Voodoo 2 cards were installed in a system and configured properly, each card would alternate rendering odd and even scan lines. The end result was typically a huge increase in performance, with frame rates nearly double that of a single Voodoo 2.
Most modern GPUs from Nvidia and AMD can be paired up to work together as well, but they work very differently than the Voodoo 2 of old. Modern graphics cards running in multi-GPU configurations typically render alternate frames or split a frame horizontally (or into tiles), with each GPU working on a particular portion of the frame. But pairing multiple graphics cards together still can substantially increase performance.
The process is actually pretty simple, so let's get started!
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