NVIDIA's GeForce 6 SLI: Demolishing Performance Barriers
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 23, 2004 10:23 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory Performance
We included Wolfenstein: ET in our test suite for SLI for one reason and one reason alone, to look at an older game to show SLI’s impact on a title that ran very well even on a 6600GT.
You can see by the resolution scaling graph that we are completely CPU bound at all resolutions here, much like what we saw from UT2004. Only the 6600GT actually benefits from SLI, bringing it up to 6800GT speeds thanks to a 31% performance improvement.
With the 6800GT and Ultra, even at 1600 x 1200 with AA/AF enabled the performance gains from SLI are nothing major. The 6600GT continues to provide impressive performance gains, bringing it up to the level of a 6800GT thanks to SLI.
The important thing to take away from these numbers is that on today’s high end cards, SLI is very much a technology that is suited for the latest games as well as tomorrow’s titles. But for midrange cards SLI can definitely enable higher resolution and/or AA gaming.
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bob661 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
#18The hardcore gamers would just buy new video cards.
reboos - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
"Nvidia bought the patents, pending patent applications, trademarks, brand names, and chip inventory related to the graphics business of 3dfx."http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/15/2244256.shtm...
fuzzynavel - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
I think 3DFX were bought by nvidia...or at least the rights to the technology....so it is technically the same company...I remember the days of 3DFX scan line interleave....fantastic!bob661 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
#17Two Opterons would be downright scary if they were limited too. But a 4000 is no slouch. :-) It's still amazing. I happen to agree with #12 but the real test of that theory would be to test slower CPU's and see how the performance scales.
reboos - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Odd as it may sound, should we be thanking 3DFX for this?http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/15/2244256.shtm...
Gnoad - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Although SLI is exciting, I found myself wanting more info on the Asus board...haris - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
I just had some more thoughts about why SLI/Multi rendering might not be such a great move by Nvidia/ATI.When they launch their next generation cards they are expecting to rake in some extra money from the extreme gamers, right? What happens to that same card when they start purchasing relatively cheap last gen cards instead. This might then lead to something like this: In order for them to get that additional $ during the begining of the next gen card's life cycle they might have to slow down the production cycle of cards to give them more time in the high-end position.
Jeff7181 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
#14... why? You have TWO GPU's here... and ONE CPU. Why is it so amazing that two GPU's can put the squeenze on one CPU? Now... stick a 6800U SLI setup with a couple Opteron 250's with an application that's multi-threaded and THEN I'd be amazed if it was still CPU limited.Aquila76 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Or was that 330 Watts the total system usage? (doubtful)Aquila76 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
What power supply was used in your testbed? If the SLI setup requires at load ~ 330 Watts, I would think you'd need around a 550W unit for your setup.