Gigabyte Dual GPU: nForce4, Intel, and the 3D1 Single Card SLI Tested

Half-Life 2 Performance

Unfortunately, we were unable to test the Intel platform under Half-Life 2. We aren't quite sure how to explain the issue that we were seeing, but in trying to run the game, the screen would flash between each frame. There were other visual issues as well. Due to these issues, performance was not comparable to our other systems. Short of a hard crash, this was the worst possible kind of problem that we could have seen. It is very likely that this could be an issue that NVIDIA may have fixed between 71.20 and 66.81 on Intel systems, but we are unable to test any other driver at this time.

We are also not including the 6800 Ultra scores, as the numbers that we were using as a reference (from our article on NVIDIA's official SLI launch) were run using the older version 6 of Half-Life 2 as well as older (different) versions of our timedemos.

Continuing our trend with Half-Life 2 and graphics card tests, we've benched the game in 5 different levels in two resolutions with and without 4xAA/8xAF enabled. We've listed the raw results in these tables for those who are interested. For easier analysis, we've taken the average performance of each of the 5 level tests and compared the result in our graphs below.

Half-Life 2 1280x1024 noAA/AF
	at_c17_12	at_canals_08	at_coast_05	at_coast_12	at_prison_05
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT	76.1	71.3	115	94.9	80
2x NVIDIA 6600 GT (AMD SLI)	77.2	98.8	118.5	117.5	116.6
Gigabyte 2x6600GT 3D1	77.3	99.1	118.7	117.9	118.2

Half-Life 2 1600x1200 noAA/AF
	at_c17_12	at_canals_08	at_coast_05	at_coast_12	at_prison_05
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT	61.1	55.7	91.5	69.3	57.6
2x NVIDIA 6600 GT (AMD SLI)	73.5	85.8	110.8	104.9	92.9
Gigabyte 2x6600GT 3D1	73.6	87	111.4	106	94.6

Half-Life 2 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF
	at_c17_12	at_canals_08	at_coast_05	at_coast_12	at_prison_05
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT	40.5	40.1	74.8	54.9	45.1
2x NVIDIA 6600 GT (AMD SLI)	45.2	47.8	92.4	81	61
Gigabyte 2x6600GT 3D1	45.7	47.8	94.1	82.8	62.3

Half-Life 2 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF
	at_c17_12	at_canals_08	at_coast_05	at_coast_12	at_prison_05
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT	27.3	27.2	43.3	32.7	28.1
2x NVIDIA 6600 GT (AMD SLI)	33.8	35.3	58.1	49.2	39.8
Gigabyte 2x6600GT 3D1	33.8	35.3	59.3	50.8	40.6

The 3D1 averages about one half to one frame higher in performance than two stock clocked 6600 GT's in SLI mode. This equates to a difference of absolutely nothing with frame rates of near 100fps. Even the overclocked RAM doesn't help the 3D1 here.

We see more of the same when we look at performance with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. The Gigabyte 3D1 performs on par with 2 x 6600GT cards in SLI. With the RAM overclocked, this means that the bottleneck under HL2 is somewhere else when running in SLI mode. We've seen GPU and RAM speed to impact HL2 performance pretty evenly under single GPU conditions.