AnandTech: NVIDIA's 3-way SLI: Can we finally play Crysis?

So, you wanna 3-way?

We ran the following games in their corresponding quality settings:

Game	Resolution	AA	AF	Detail Settings
Unreal Tournament 3	2560 x 1600	0X	16X	Highest in-game
Bioshock	2560 x 1600	0X	1X	Highest in-game
Oblivion	2560 x 1600	4X	16X	Ultra High Quality defaults
Call of Duty 4	2560 x 1600	4X	16X	Highest in-game
World in Conflict	2560 x 1600	4X	4X	Very High Quality defaults
Crysis	1920 x 1200	0X	1X	High Quality defaults

We tried to push the graphics settings as far as possible while still being playable, there's no point in showcasing incredible improvements if they aren't playable on 3-way SLI. Now onto the results:

Number of Cards	UT3	Bioshock	Oblivion	CoD4	WIC	Crysis
8800 Ultra x1	66.2	40.5	25.9	41.5	21	24.4
8800 Ultra x2	122	61.9	47.5	78.9	27	42.2
8800 Ultra x3	146.1	103.8	49	100.7	31	43.2

Configuration	UT3	Bioshock	Oblivion	CoD4	WIC	Crysis
2-way SLI Improvement over 1 card	84%	53%	83%	90%	28%	73%
3-way SLI improvement over 2 cards	20%	68%*	3%	28%	15%	7%
3-way SLI improvement over 1 card	121%	156%	89%	143%	48%	85%

Overall performance scaling ranges from virtually nonexistent in games like Oblivion, to noticeable in games like Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3.

We can't really explain why we saw such great scaling in Bioshock, but we repeated the test countless times only to see the same results. It doesn't exactly make sense that the jump from two to three cards would yield more of a performance boost than the jump from one to two cards, so take those results with a grain of salt.

You can't use the word value to describe the benefit of 3-way SLI, as increasing your graphics investment by 50% to increase performance on the order of 0 - 30% just doesn't make sense.

The other thing to keep in mind is that 3-way SLI also doesn't really make games like Crysis any more playable, which is exactly where we need the additional GPU power. There's supposed to be a Crysis SLI patch coming out in the near future that should improve SLI scaling, but given that we could only run the game smoothly at 1920 x 1200 with High Quality defaults, we doubt that 3-way SLI is the solution to perfecting your PC's Crysis performance.

Call of Duty 4 showed some excellent scaling, but the bang for the buck is the issue more than anything. A 30% increase in performance over a two card SLI setup is nice, but we'd put our money on being able to get that same performance increase by waiting for an updated G92 version of the 8800 Ultra and SLI-ing a couple of those together.

The other thing that this subsection of game tests shows us is that there are more games that scale poorly than games that scale well. We could make an argument for 3-way SLI if everything scaled like Call of Duty or UT3, but then there are games like World in Conflict, Oblivion and Crysis that just don't.