NVIDIA's GeForce 6 SLI: Demolishing Performance Barriers
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 23, 2004 10:23 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Far Cry Performance
Once again, no surprise that at 1024 x 768 there’s no real performance gains from SLI – having two of the fastest GPUs around means that even an Athlon 64 4000+ isn’t fast enough to extract the full performance of two GPUs at 1024 x 768. The difference between Far Cry and a game like Doom 3 is that even at 1280 x 1024, SLI doesn’t help out much either. For the 6800 Ultra the performance gain due to SLI is barely 6% and only 10% on the 6800GT; while we would normally be happy with these types of performance gains, remember that they are at the expense of purchasing two cards. The 6600GT gains a reasonable 19% boost in SLI mode, but that’s not enough to make it faster than a single 6800GT or Ultra.
We start to see some performance gains at 1600 x 1200, 23% for the 6800 Ultra, 31% for the 6800GT and 43% for the 6600GT. Once again, only the 6600GT really gets an appreciable performance gain here, but it’s still not enough to outperform a single 6800GT – although it comes extremely close.
The real performance gains for the 6800 Ultra and 6800GT happen at 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 8X AF enabled, improving performance by close to 60% for the 6800 Ultra and by almost 70% for the 6800GT. Once again, SLI makes higher resolution AA/AF modes playable where they weren’t before. For the 6600GT, SLI brings the performance levels up to that of a single 6800GT, but no faster.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
74 Comments
View All Comments
Kolbe - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
BUYER BEWARE!!first, I have this ASUS motherboard and two GigaByte 6600GT's. AFter countless hours of trying to get this to work AND of course upgrading bios and drivers, I came to find out that these two gigabyte cards are not certified by Nvidia and they will not work in the sli mode on this ASUS board. ASUS has not returned my calls or my emails, but gigabyte, bless their hearts, wrote me back and said in essence: "our 6600GT cards work on OUR board" so too bad. Thank God for Newegg and their awesome return policy. I am returning these two and getting one 6800 GT, but of course, not from Gigabyte!
mashie - Sunday, December 5, 2004 - link
It would be nice to see tests at 2048x1536. After all if you can afford the videocards for SLI I bet you can get a proper monitor as well ;)Denial - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
Again, why no vanilla 6800's? How would they compete with the 6600GT's in SLI? This is starting to get rediculous.nserra - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
Sorry forgot link.http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/...
nserra - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
#69 Yeah i agree.But let me tell you i already see something that SLI will give me.
Having a 6600 and a X700 on the same PC.
piroroadkill - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
I don't know if anyone's said this, but SLI is an absolutely stupid idea, why on earth don't they take the 3Dfx Voodoo5 approach and just stick two GPUs on one card? Surely this would yield similar benefits without special mobo requirements.. 16x PCIe is easily enough bandwidth to cope... then just double the amount of RAM on the card and surely this is more viable solution? sure it'd be an insanely costly card, but still cheaper than an SLI setup, and lets face it, once a single card can outpace your shiny new SLI setup, that SLI setup is going to look poor value for money and you're just going to waste both cards, it seems obscene.stance - Thursday, November 25, 2004 - link
will the new duel core amd cpus that come out mext year be supported by this motherboardstance - Thursday, November 25, 2004 - link
tombman - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
ANAND, please answer:1.) Can you really force SLI for games with no profile in the driver?
2.) please make 2048x1536 or higher Tests (my CRT can da 2304x1440 :D)
3.) please make 8xAA Tests
4.) please check if HDR (high dynamic range rendering) in far cry works in SLI mode (other sites say no)
Especially # 1.) is very important.
If only games with a profile can run in SLI mode, SLI will not become very popular imo. We know nvidia- they will only have profiles for benchmarks and most common hyped games. For not so popular games there surely will be no profiles...
thx
tombman - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
test