Performance - GeForce 7800GTX SLI
Unlike the GeForce 6600s we used last week, the GeForce 7800GTX is system limited with our setup. So, we limit our testing to game that scales well graphically, which includes older games such as Call of Duty, Richard Burns Rally and newer games such as F.E.A.R, Quake 4, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Serious Sam II. To push these cards extra hard, we ran test with and without 4x AA and 16x AF. In older games, these settings are forced through the driver panel, while in newer games these settings are enabled in game. However, with some games, we had to force 8xS from the driver panel since it was not possible to enable 8xS in game.In addition to AA and AF, we also perform additional testing with HDR and transparency antialiasing. All other settings are set to the max - full detail except for soft shadows in F.E.A.R. Quake 4 was set to High Quality, with AA and AF set through the command 'r_multisamples 4' and 'image_anisotropy 16'.
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 GeForce 7800GTX DDR3 256 MB graphics card
(running at reference clocks - core 430 MHz / memory 600 MHz (1200 MHz effective))
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GB 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
Performance
The results:
Unlike what we're seeing last week, there's little difference running this game with and without SLI. Even with AA and AF, there's practically no difference between a single card and SLI in 1600 x 1200. It will take a significantly faster processor than the Athlon 64 3500+ to see any difference between single and multi rendering in this game.
There's no doubt SLI is paying dividends to gamers playing this game who are fortunate enough to have two GeForce 7800GTX. We can see that a single GeForce 7800GTX begin to loose steam in 1280 x 1024 while the SLI setup is barely breaking a sweat. In fact, the SLI setup still has enough pixel pushing power to push more than 100 fps with 4x AA and 16x AF at 1600 x 1200. What if we threw transparency supersampling antialiasing into the mix?
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