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Doin' da SLI thing
Right then, it's time to have a look at SLI performance. All cards that we review today have been submitted twice, meaning we where able to run them in dual-gpu .. SLI mode.
Now since we are very time constrained and also due to the fact that your right finger is slowly getting numb from pushing next page we limited SLI testing to 4 titles. All titles however are newer games that are not very CPU bound and that's the most important thing to show off the importance and effect of SLI.
Make no mistake, yhe high-end card ALL will run into CPU limitation though. There is simply no way to feed enough CPU power at this time (no a dual-core FX-60 won't matter either).
F.e.a.r.
The results are quite stunning though. Follow me please where we'll start off with that awesome title F.e.a.r.
Now for f.e.a.r. every possible high quality setting was enabled, except soft shadows. Not only that we use 4xAA and 16xAF at this test to make it a little more difficult on the graphics cores. Have a look for yourself.
Red resembles the 7600 GT
Green resembles the 7900 GT
Blue resembles the 7900 GTX
So again .. the results shown are based on maximum in-game quality mode. As you can see you'll gain the most bang for you bucks with the slower cards. Your performance will go up almost 100% As most of you know F.e.a.r with maximum settings is a total biach to run. Stunning SLI results all over the entire line of cards.
Serious Sam 2
Serious Sam is a tad more CPU bound then the rest of the gang. None the less look at SLI kick in once you pass 1280x1024. Look at that 7600 GT with a dual card setup. Mind you that you are looking at 16x anisotropic filtering & HDR enabled. The in game quality settings are set at maximum. The 7900 GT offers a massive gain also. The 7900 GTX however definitely show a big gain but not as much as the previous two. Why ? CPU limitation. If used a fictional AMD Athlon FX-90 we'd see similar behavior in performance as the 7600/7900 GTs offer.
It also proofs that High-End SLI costs a lot of money when you compare it in an FPS per dollar value.
Next page please where we'll take a look at Quake 4 in SLI.
