Performance - GeForce 6600 SLI
Just as before, we have to use a system where performance differences can be easily shown. We reused our test setup from the last article, replacing the single hard drive with an RAID 0 array for RAID 0 testing. A reference clocked GeForce 7800GTX which is system limited with this setup, is again used, with a resolution of 1024 x 768, 32 bit - no AA, AF or any other settings are enabled. This also mean not enabling HDR on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Serious Sam II, no Ultra Settings in Quake 4, or Soft Shadows in F.E.A.R. All other settings are maxed out - full detail.We'd like to thank both Tagan and Kingston for supplying with the additional power supply and 1 GB memory modules for this article.
Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
2 x Gigabyte GeForce 6600 DDR2 256 MB graphics card
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 81.98 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.70 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c
The results:
At first glance, SLI doesn't seem to offer any performance improvement. However, if we look closely at SLI's AA and AF results, we can see SLI indeed offer a performance increase over a single card. The gain is substantial but as we expected are no where near 100 % - it's more around 30 %. This increase can still be seen at 1600 x 1200, although the nominal frame rates still won't offer high enough frame rates for enjoyable gaming. That's not because of SLI, rather the graphics card of choice here - the GeForce 6600.
Homeworld 2 is another story all together. SLI couldn't offer you higher frame rates with this game, in fact we're getting much lower frame rates. If you really want to use SLI to play Homeworld 2, use single mode rendering or SLI antialiasing. Even the game's default profile embedded in the drivers made use of SLI antialiasing by default.
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