NVIDIA Single Card, Multi-GPU: GeForce 7950 GX2
by Derek Wilson on June 5, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Half-Life 2 Episode One Performance
Even the newest installment of HL2 is CPU limited at the high end under 1600x1200. These tests do show that, in spite of the CPU limitation, the multi-GPU overhead isn't incredibly damaging under the Source engine.
The performance advantage of 7950 GX2 increases moving up in resolution and adding AA. While there is a benefit due to the hardware at this level of quality, framerates this high are just not necessary for playing HL2. Those with a 1600x1200 resolution limit who play HL2 style games won't need to drop $600 on hardware to get a great experience.
At the top end of our performance tests, we don't see any surprises. The 7950 GX2 is the king of HL2 as far as single board solutions go. Getting this baby in SLI for a quad GPU solution will be quite interesting indeed.
Even the newest installment of HL2 is CPU limited at the high end under 1600x1200. These tests do show that, in spite of the CPU limitation, the multi-GPU overhead isn't incredibly damaging under the Source engine.
The performance advantage of 7950 GX2 increases moving up in resolution and adding AA. While there is a benefit due to the hardware at this level of quality, framerates this high are just not necessary for playing HL2. Those with a 1600x1200 resolution limit who play HL2 style games won't need to drop $600 on hardware to get a great experience.
At the top end of our performance tests, we don't see any surprises. The 7950 GX2 is the king of HL2 as far as single board solutions go. Getting this baby in SLI for a quad GPU solution will be quite interesting indeed.
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JarredWalton - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
Yes, SLI profiles are used for full utilization of the GX2 card. (AFAIK - Derek can correct me if I'm wrong.)DerekWilson - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
SLI profiles are used if availalbe, but SLI profiles are never required to enable multi-GPU support on NVIDIA hardware.there are some advanced options for enabling multi-GPU or single-GPU rendering in the control panel -- even down to the AFR or SFR mode type (and SLIAA modes as a fallback if nothing else will work for you).
in short -- required: no, used: yes.
araczynski - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
haven't read the article yet as I didn't see reference to Oblivion benchmarks, and lets be honest, that's the only game out these days that's worth benchmarking (in terms of actually giving the high end cards an actual workout).DigitalFreak - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
It's amazing all the cool stuff you can do with PCI Express.Sniderhouse - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
The Voodoo5 5500 had two GPUs on a single card which did true SLI, not to mention the Voodoo5 6000 which had four GPUs, but never really made it to market.
shabby - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
The x24 was also a dual pcb video card, thats what he meant. Not dual chip or whatever.timmiser - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
Exactly what I was thinking!DerekWilson - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
Perhaps I should have said successful products ... or products that were availble in any real quantity :-)photoguy99 - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
From page 1, what limitations are being referred to?Ryan Smith - Monday, June 5, 2006 - link
DX9 itself has a good deal of overhead in some situations, something Microsoft is changing for DX10. We'll have more on that in our upcomming Vista article later this week.