NVIDIA SLI Performance Preview with MSI's nForce4 SLI Motherboard
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2004 5:06 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Counterstrike: Source VST Performance
With Half Life 2 less than a month away, performance under the Source VST is very important.
At 1024 x 768 the performance is already pretty impressive, but with SLI it is skyrocketed into a completely new level with the 6800GT showing a 23.8% increase in performance and the 6600GT going up by around 54%.
It's impressive to see that at 1024 x 768 with 4X AA the 6800GTs in SLI mode are still CPU limited by the fastest AMD chip on the planet.
At 1280 x 1024 we see something quite unusual, the 6800GT gains much more from SLI than the 6600GT. The 6800GT received a 63.5% performance boost from SLI while the 6600GT gets "only" a 45.7% improvement; given the beta nature of the drivers we'll avoid hypothesizing about why.
At 1600 x 1200 the performance gains peak just under 70%.
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SDA - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
Maybe, maybe not, #3. Modern PSUs have a lot more juice than the systems actually use. I wouldn't be surprised if a 380W Tagan could handle an A64 rig with dual 6800Us.Anyway, yeah, this is decidedly sexy. What I like about it is that it actually has appeal for normal people as well... say you want to buy a midrange system that you can upgrade easily later. Get a dual PCI-E 16x motherboard and a 6600GT, then add in another 6600GT whenever you feel like you want a performance boost! Shame SLI isn't available on the 6200...
ukDave - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
1600x1200 high detail for any current game, that certainly is impressive. I'm an 'ATi Fanboy', but congrats to nVidia, damn fine job.I think even my luberly Tagan might have issues running two on these 6800 Ultras :o
keitaro - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
Here's an interesting idea... take SLI setup, plug in 2 17in to 19in LCD monitors, do some benchmarks and play with that setup for a while. Then tell us about the experience. :)xsilver - Friday, October 29, 2004 - link
Sweet.... Sweet candy ...... drools... wants nowI'm no fanboy but those ATI fanboys will have to give in to the fact that nvidia now has the "fastest" card abeit it will cost 2x more
Finally on the issue of SLI if the exact same card must be used to enable SLI, is there any info on the future availability of these cards.... eg if u buy a 6600gt now in 18 months this card may not be available anymore? eg. will be 6700gt? will these be compatible? Forcing you to upgrade before the product is phased out may not be so good
Also just noticed in the far cry 1600x1200 test SLI is more than 100% faster... how the hell does that work? margin of error?