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Hardware Entertainment Games

SLI Performance Reviewed at Anandtech 45

Posted by Zonk from the two-chips-means-twice-the-shiny dept.
DarkSarin writes "Anandtech has a review of dual gpu's using nvidia's nforce4 SLI chipset. They are showing ~66 fps on doom3 at 1600x1200 with 4xAA turned on (a 75% increase in performance over a single gpu). It's not available yet, but it should be fairly soon."
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SLI Performance Reviewed at Anandtech More

SLI Performance Reviewed at Anandtech

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  • Nice! But... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by glowimperial ( 705397 )
    I wonder how many of us are actually going to shell out for new graphics hardware. We are kind of hitting the wall in performace here already.
    • Not until the hardware is pushing 100FPS with all the eye-candy on at the highest settings and at the highest resolution your monitor could possibly do.

      No walls, except those made out of cellophane.
    • We are in no way hitting the wall in performance.

      Perhaps you meant that we are hitting the wall in terms of the price/performance curve, with which I agree 100%. Most of us cannot justify the cost of these new cards, given the associated performance increase.

      Then again, this really isn't anything we all don't already know.
      Moderator Points: -1, Obvious
    • I was thinking about that, what would you need for the perfect gaming machine. Entirely theoretical :P

      Basically to get past the point where software is at now (remember it will take a long LONG time for software to be able to model really complex systems, we need to scale the nuclear model). However there are graphics right now which they are attempting to render in real time, TOY STORY!

      All the CGI animations coming out of say PIXAR are lightyears ahead of what we see in games right now, however it is a

  • Expensive..... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by spicy salsa ( 826249 )
    I wonder how many people will actually use this. Two 6800 GT's at 400 dollars each equals 800 dollars. Plus your going to need a massive power supply. One 6800 GT requires a 350 watt power supply so would two require a 700 watt power supply?! Yeeeesh....

    Free Flat Screen HERE! [freeflatscreens.com]

  • Where are the Quake III Arena results? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I want to see 700fps in Q3A. Not sure why, but I do.

  • Math doesn't add up (Score:3, Informative)

    by chrismcdirty ( 677039 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @02:01PM (#10665263) Homepage
    So I'm expected to shell out 2x$$$ for a video card, extra $$$ for the mobo with 2xPCI-E, extra $$$ for the huge powersupply, but only get a 75% performace gain?

    • Re:Math doesn't add up (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes...And you'll do as you're told. Now go clean your room!

      • This is a bit more insightful than just funny.

        No one is telling the parent poster to go out and buy these cards, and buy this hardware. Yes, it is being marketed (since "reviews" are really just a cheaper way of marketing for these people), but no one is making up your mind for you to plunk down two wads of cash for two graphics cards.

        This is the typical outburst that I hear from the lemmings that line up for plastic, and buy what the television tells them to buy. :ugh:

    • I agree with you, but having the cutting edge equipment never scales in "bang-for-the-buck."
    • 2.5 times the price for 1.75 times the speed is a quite good ratio for a very high end upgrade.

      An athlon 4000+ costs almost 3 times as much as a 3400+ with a less than 20% increase in speed. (and a dual cpu upgrade won't help in any game)

    • Re:Math doesn't add up (Score:3, Informative)

      by UWC ( 664779 )
      The point made at the end of the article is that even if you can't afford two now, you can get one, and in 6 or 12 months not only will the current top of the line be cheaper, but you can get a huge performance increase by just buying an extra one (and maybe a bigger power supply) instead of replacing your current card entirely.
      • We've been talking about this at my local LAN group. I just don't buy into it. In 6 months, the top of the line game will be optimized for UberPixelSlamin 3.75. Your card will only support 3.70. So, now you have a choice: spend more money to do SLI and still not have the features you want; scrap the card and buy one that does have features you want.

        Look at it this way. I just bought a FX5900 in January. I can't remember what I paid, but I know I saved up for a while. Now they have these 68oo thingie

        • Look at it this way. I just bought a FX5900 in January. I can't remember what I paid, but I know I saved up for a while. Now they have these 68oo thingies. They are only about a cunt-hair faster than mine, but they support more cool stuff like pixel shaders and bump mapping.

          That's a pretty big cunt hair [anandtech.com] you've got there.

          Also, Nvidia must have really taken a step backwards to have knocked bump mapping out of the FX series, considering that environment bump mapping has been in cards since the Matrox G4

          • Selective benchmarking? You picked the biggest difference you could find.

            NWN has less than a 10fps differnece.

            FFXI is only about 1000 whatevers slower.

            Wolf:ET is about 10fps slower.

            UT2k4 is also about 10fps slower.

            Also, all of these were run at 1280*1024. Running at the more common 1024*768 would close that 10fps gap quickly.

            Yes, my card does have bumpmapping. I was just being an asshole about features like PixelShaders and "full Dx9 compatible" which seem to be artifically gimped on older generati

            • Halo is a shader/video card bound game, just like almost all future graphically impressive games will be, like doom 3 is, like HL2 will be. NWN, all the Q3 engined games, and UT2K4 are far less video card bound, relying much more on the CPU.

              They test at that res to try and get away from games being CPU bound and actually test the performance of the *card*, not the system it's in, testing the CPU in video card reviews offers less differentiated graphs, for some reason :-P.

              You basically want benchmarks th

      • Nah, that's not going to work. Pairing any two components that aren't bought at the same time never works well. SLI is about having better performance than you can get from one of the top of the line cards.
    • a.) It's not NVidia's fault you'd have to buy a new mobo.

      b.) if you really need the performance that bad, you'll be hard pressed to spend 2x on the card and find a >75% faster card that uses only one slot.

      c.) It's optional, not expected.
    • A lot of the tests are limited by the CPU, which becomes very apparent with such a ridiculous amount of graphics power. The amount gained depended upon the game (notice that in Far Cry, for example, there was a 105% gain for the 6800GT at 1600x1200, 4xAA).
    • Yes. SLI allows you to get better performance than is possible with the best single card. If you want the best 3D framerate you can get, the solution is SLI. It doesn't matter that the overhead means you don't double your performance, there's no other way to get performance this good.

  • Some of you guys are missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29, 2004 @02:10PM (#10665406)
    Yeah, it's expensive, but cost has never really ever been the point. Having the fastest computer is.

    I totally undestand how some of you guys wouldn't spend that kind of cash on an SLI system, you just want a sensible computer for everyday use. Well, guess what? I don't. I want the highest framerates possible, so when I play my brother online in Halo or Doom 3 deathmatch, I can SPANK HIS ASS.

    I think that nvidia bringing back the SLI upgrade path is not only sensible, it's FUN. And that's the point.
    • Well, anything over 60 FPS is not going to help you anyway. The eye can't see much over 60 FPS. A dual card setup will allow you to run Doom III at very high detail levels though. If you want to run a game like Doom III with everything turned on then by all means buy two video cards. Graphics just don't mean that much to me, I don't mind turning down the detail levels a little bit.

      Free Flat Screen HERE! [freeflatscreens.com]

      • Re:Some of you guys are missing the point (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well, anything over 60 FPS is not going to help you anyway.

        Uhh, do you actually play first person shooters competitively or on a regular basis at all? There's a tremendous difference in feel between a system doing 100+ frames per second and one that's just doing around 60.

        10 out of 10 gamers, people who do this all the time, who were going into a competition would pick the former machine over the latter, every time.

        Graphics just don't mean that much to me

        Then WTF are you posting here about? Are you

  • It's called Lock-In (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alzheimers ( 467217 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @02:27PM (#10665658)
    There's a very simple reason why this SLI is so desireable by the marketing types at NVidia -- Lock In. Sure, you may only have the cash to buy one card right now, but in a year when ATI releases their next new thing are you going to spend *another* $400 for the next new card, or are you going to buy the now "Budget" 6800 and get almost as good performance?

  • Doom3 is capped at 60fps (Score:3, Informative)

    by fok ( 449027 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @02:41PM (#10665835) Homepage
    RTFA: http://www.shacknews.com/finger/?fid=raduffy@idsof tware.com [shacknews.com]

    So 66fps is good enough ;)

  • nVidia, best drivers bar none (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @04:26PM (#10667072)
    It surprised me how painless the SLI setup process was described. Writting GPU drivers is complex enough without having to handle multiple accelerators, never mind having optimal performance AND making the install painless.

    nVidia does their homework with their drivers, and it shows. GPU drivers are 50% of their perfomance. It sucks for ATI, because they have the better hardware, but their drivers suck (and pretty much always did).
  • The screenshots of Oblivion are *incredible*, would love to see how it'd perform with two SLI cards. If you haven't yet, do yourself a favor and look up the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion screenshots. The company pulled some bullshit marketing thing giving Game Informer some exclusives, but some people have scanned them.

    IMO, it's like having an interactive Myst, it's so pretty.
    • They gave an exclusive to Game Informer?! Wow. That's really rather ridiculous. I mean, at least with Game Informer, you can buy your game a damn good review, but no one I know reads the reviews in there because they're generally a complete pile of crap. At least the last time I read the magazine, a year ago, it was like this...and I can't imagine they've changed a whole lot. Some of the reviews it was pretty obvious had simply been paid for, and it was also obvious when you were reading a review that
      • It was a preview in this case, they're not releasing yet. In this case, Game Informer paid to host the exclusive screenshots/preview in their magazine.

        I agree, they aren't very trustworthy for reviews (almost none of the sites/magazines are).

        I'll be getting the game based on how much I got out of Morrowind, and now because it's just so beautiful.

  • maybe it will be available late next year? (Score:3)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @07:21PM (#10668674)
    I mean, come on, NONE and I mean NONE of my local computer stores have in stock ANY 6800GT (you have to preorder, takes quite a while to get it) or ANY 6800Ultra (don't think they *ever* had one in stock period) AGP. The only cards that seem to be fairly available are vanilla 6800s and even then they have been available for a month tops.

    Given that the GT/Ultra AGP cards have been announced *several months* ago, before their PCIe versions will be available likely NVidia will have already announced the 8xxxx series or something.

    I fondly remember being able to buy video cards max. 2 weeks after they were announced, then it was a month, then two, and now it seems cards become available together with the paper launch of the new models :(

    I really feel for the stores, though, it must suck being able to stock only 'previous generation' parts.
  • They are showing ~66 fps on doom3 at 1600x1200 with 4xAA turned on

    Were there any monsters on screen at the time? Was there any discarge of firearms? In my Doom 3 experience, you could go for a good 10 minutes with nothing worth shooting at - this would surely throw the fps up?

    Oh no! A teleporting cyberdemon! No wait, it's just doing the Doom 3 stutter-shuffle.

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