NVIDIA's GeForce 6 SLI: Demolishing Performance Barriers
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 23, 2004 10:23 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Doom 3 Performance
As you can expect, SLI offers no benefits at 1024 x 768, but as early as 1280 x 1024 we start to see some reasonable performance gains. The 6800 Ultra gets a 22% increase in performance, while the 6800GT gets a slightly bigger bump of 26% thanks to SLI. The big winner here is the GeForce 6600GT whose frame rate jumps 43% from 63.6 up to 91.1 thanks to SLI. Here we begin to see some of the upgrade potential of SLI, with two 6600GTs offering slightly greater performance than a single GeForce 6800 Ultra at 1280 x 1024.
At 1600 x 1200 the 6800 Ultra sees a 39% performance increase in SLI mode, breaking the 100 fps barrier in Doom 3’s built in demo. The 6800GT gets even more of a performance boost at 53%, bringing it to within striking distance of a SLI 6800 Ultra setup. The 6600GT also becomes much more playable at 1600 x 1200 with SLI enabled.
Enabling Antialiasing simply increases the benefits of SLI. Now at 1024 x 768 there is a performance advantage to having two GPUs, and for the 6800 Ultra that’s a 34% increase in performance. Once again, the margins of improvement get better as you move to slower GPUs – 36% for the 6800GT and 66% for the 6600GT. At 1024 x 768 with 4X AA the two 6600GTs manage to offer performance that’s just slightly faster than a single 6800GT.
Going up in resolution we continue to see some impressive gains, but what matters here isn’t that SLI results in a 63% performance increase for the 6800 Ultra and 72% for a 6800GT, what matters is that SLI makes 1280 x 1024 with 4X AA and 8X AF very smooth, something that was not possible with only a single card. Despite the performance improvement, two 6600GTs are not able to pull ahead of even a single 6800 Ultra in this test, which shows you some of the limits of SLI. While the 6600GT in SLI mode does much better than a single 6800 Ultra at “lower” resolutions like 1280 x 1024 with AA disabled, turning on antialiasing still preys on the bandwidth and fillrate limitations of an 8-pipe 6600GT with only 16GB/s of memory bandwidth.
What’s important to note here is that the recommendation varies greatly based on resolution. While the 6800GT does incredibly well paired up with another card, the 6600GT only offers better performance than a single 6800 Ultra at non-AA resolutions. As soon as you enable AA, even a pair of 6600GTs isn’t faster than a single 6800 Ultra (or GT).
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bob661 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
#33I found one here.
http://www.sharbor.com/products/EVGN5300004.html
I don't know if they actually have one in stock though.
jshuck3 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Where are they getting the 6800GT PCI Express cards? I can't find them anywhere...are they even out yet or are these just review boards?L1FE - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
#28 If the nextgen video cards are also SLI capable, then SLI offers even more performance for a new GPU launch. If you don't want SLI that's your choice, but SLI offers consumers a wider range of choices just because cominations now make it that much more complicated. Whether that's a good or bad thing is yet to be seen, but I like how it makes things exciting between new GPU releases.T8000 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Altrough it is nice to see Nvidia take PC gaming quality one step further, these solutions are more expensive than ever before.But where does this money come from, you ask. Well, since CPU's are stuck at around 3 Ghz (or almost equal) for some time now, people look for other upgrades to buy.
And SLI is an easy way to explain that a top-end GPU solution now costs $1000 instead of $500, because it now contains two $500 cards.
But since SLI is much cheaper than pre-overclocked (Falcon/Alienware) solutions, it is currently worth its premium for a lot of users.
It also creates an interesting problem for ATI, to sell technology that is way behind for lowewr prices or to copy the SLI concept, hoping that their users are willing to wait.
miketheidiot - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
#28 the next gen of both nVidia and ATI will be only a tiny jump over the current generation. We won't see another big jump until DX10 has been out for a while. The next jump will be a 9700 to 9800 style jump, if that.http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=2340...
VIAN - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Yeah, where is 8xAA/16xAF. I want that tested. I mean with all that power, who wouldn't want to see the results of the fabulous 8xAA IQ.FICo - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
So does Nvidia now want everyone to buy 2 of their cards? I really hope its not popular. They should just design faster GPUs rather then relying on such a sledgehammer approach. Nvidia seem to bring out new GPUs once a year, and updates 6 months into a products life. So the new "Geforce 7" chip will be out end of spring time next year. Of course the performance of a single card "GeFroce 7 Ultra" will be a big jump as usual, and will most likely out perform todays PCs with dual 6800 Ultras. Nvidia's SLI technology is certainly interesting, shame its such poor value for money. Surely a dual core approach would be cheaper for the public to buy, yet still offering extra performance.Filibuster - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Dual Voodoo2 cards is what, 200Mpixel/s? :)Jeff7181 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Thinking about it more, I think I'd rather just see some 32 pipeline GPU's with 512 MB of RAM and it's very own nuclear reactor to power it :)Souka - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Anyone want SLI cheap? don't even have to upgrade your moherboard.....For sale.... two 8mb 3dFx Voodoo2 boards wih SLI cable...PCI interface of course..... it rocked in the 90's....why not now?
:)