Splinter Cell - Caspian Oil Refinery, 1024 x 768, 32
bit
Single
Multi
Splinter Cell - Caspian Oil Refinery, 1280 x 1024, 32
bit
Single
Multi
Splinter Cell - Caspian Oil Refinery, 1600 x 1200, 32
bit
Single
Multi
Splinter Cell's Caspian Oil Refinery demo is a pretty good graphics benchmark. Unfortunately, the game won't work with AA, so these results are without AA and AF. This is the first game where we see SLI multi rendering mode is faster than single rendering by default. Of course, you can see for yourself the increase is nothing spectacular - it's merely around 2 fps faster.
These are old games, so its more than likely performance won't be much different with newer drivers. So far, we can see SLI does not have a good case to support it. Yes, it can provide higher frame rates, but only with AA and AF - you only get (very) minimal increase in performance with AA and AF turned off. Then there is also the compatibility problem - some game will run slower with SLI's multi rendering mode. If we were to draw a conclusion on these results alone, we can say that SLI is not worth the price - you're way better off with a single, faster graphics card. But let's look at newer games.
Keep in mind that F.E.A.R is one extremely heavy, graphically rich game. Seeing that much performance increase at 1024 x 768 is good news indeed. By adding another card, we can now reach the minimum 30 fps mark and experience 30% percent higher frame rates on average. But even with SLI, we won't be seeing high enough frame rates in AA and AF with two GeForce 6600. This is also true for higher resolutions. With high end cards such as the GeForce 7800GTX, we may get high enough frame rates for truly lag free gaming in F.E.A.R by using SLI.
[Previous Page]
[Go to top]
[Next Page]