GeForce GTX 470 2 and 3-way SLI review - Introduction

GeForce GTX 470 2/3-way SLI

Multi-GPU gaming has become popular over the past few year mostly thanks to NVIDIA's SLI solutions and obviously later on ATI Crossfire. There is however always an interesting fact to monitor at all times, the more GPU's you add, the more problems you'll run into performance, scaling wise. A week or two ago when we posted our 3-way SLI GeForce GTX480 review we where however intrigued by the 'overall' good scaling of the GF100 GPU embedded on that graphics card. And despite the fact that even with three cards (GPUs) you'll quickly run into CPU bottlenecks, it just somehow did not disappoint.

So that made us wonder what would happen if we took three much cheaper GeForce GXT 470 graphics cards, I mean .. you save 150 bucks per card over a GTX 480, and that could make a huge difference both price and performance wise.

The Fermi based cards however are still hard to get and it was a bit of a struggle to get a good quantity of cards for testing in house. So today's article has been made with the friendly help of Point of View graphics and Zotac who both submitted a card for this article, combined with our reference sample we can now bring you the second article in a series of SLI articles based on the GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards. GeForce GTX 400 series might have had a rough start but if we filter out the mighty thorn of this release, the heat and noise levels, then for a minute everybody can wholeheartedly admit that they are beautifully performing graphics cards.

As a result today we'll 'finally' have a look at the SLI scaling of that GeForce GTX 470. We look at single card performance, dual-card performance but also triple (3-way) SLI performance to see how well these puppies will scale.

The article will first cover SLI performance among the new GTX 470s in several configurations and games, and then we'll check a little one on one with 2-way Multi-GPU gaming in a multi-GPU slaughter-fest article in the ATI versus NVIDIA kind of way, to see who and what scales the best.

Over the next few pages we'll tell you a bit about multi-GPU gaming, the challenges, the requirements and of course a nice tasty benchmark session.