Performance
AA and AF settings are applied in game, whenever possible. We had to apply AA and AF from the driver panel for Call of Duty and Richard Burns Rally. In Quake 4, we enable both AA and AF from the console, with the command 'r_multisamples' set to 4 and 'image_anisotropy' set to 16. V sync was disabled both from inside the game and on the driver panel. AA and AF is enabled from the settings menu for F.E.A.R, Serious Sam II and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.Call of Duty and Richard Burns Rally was configured to the highest possible detail. F.E.A.R settings are set to our usual test settings (all settings set to maximum / on except for soft shadows), but for this article, we turned off volumetric lights. Quake 4 was set to 'High Quality' while Serious Sam II was tested with our usual standard settings (maximum settings but with custom resolution, anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings). The same also applies to Splinter Cell Chaos Theory - the game was benchmarked to use its shader model 3.0 and everything turned on (except for HDR).
We ran our usual tests under two different configurations - one with a single GeForce 7600GT and then with two GeForce 7600GT in SLI's multi rendering mode. We've also included results with application specific profiles for comparison purposes.
We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply 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 7600GT DDR3 256 MB graphics card
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 84.21 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 6.70 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c
The results:
The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group represent test results under default settings, and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled. These results are in frame rates per second.Overall, results from a pair of GeForce 7600GT running in SLI seems to be lower than from a single card, even when AA and AF is enabled. This is obviously not a good sign. From our past experience with a pair of GeForce 6600, Call of Duty is one of the games that really benefit from the addition of a second card. However, when we look at these results, it would seem SLI is not really offering anything significant here. Could we be system limited? We don't think so - we saw higher frame rates from a GeForce 7800GTX and 7900GTX on this very same setup. We're pretty certain we've hit the graphical limit here and from the looks of it, we're not pixel shader / texture bound.
The additional pixel processing power of the second card is mostly unused, however the additional driver overhead with SLI remains. So instead of an increase, we see a very small drop in performance. It's very small, but it's there and consistent across all resolutions. Even enabling NVIDIA's optimized profile is not going to help much. This is simply all that GeForce 7600GT SLI can offer with Call of Duty.
Compared to Crossfire, SLI is obviously not doing as good of a job with this game. If you remember, we saw an increase with a pair of Radeon X1600XTs and X1900s in default settings and with AA / AF enabled (though the increase is very small with the X1900s). But before we make any conclusions, let's look at the other benchmarks.
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