NVIDIA's GeForce 6 SLI: Demolishing Performance Barriers
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 23, 2004 10:23 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Half Life 2 Performance Summary
In order to best characterize the performance improvement from SLI in Half Life 2 we averaged the performance gains across our five benchmarks at each resolution:
| Half Life 2 Average Performance Gain due to SLI | |||
1024 x 768 |
1280 x 1024 |
1600 x 1200 |
|
| NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra | -4% |
0% |
20% |
| NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT | 0% |
9% |
22% |
| NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT | -1% |
17.6% |
40.5% |
At 1024 x 768 you see there’s basically no performance improvement with SLI enabled, and in some cases it’s actually slightly slower. Even at 1280 x 1024, only the 6600GT gets a decent performance improvement, but at 1600 x 1200 we see performance improvements across the board. The 6600GT has the most to gain at 1600 x 1200, moving up by about 40%, and offering performance greater than both a single 6800GT and 6800 Ultra.
With AA enabled, all of the cards make decent gains from enabling SLI. The 6600GT reaches its performance limit at 41%, but the 6800 Ultra manages a 48% gain at 1600 x 1200 and the 6800GT does even better with an average improvement of 54%.
| Half Life 2 Average Performance Gain due to SLI with 4X AA & 8X AF | |||
1024 x 768 |
1280 x 1024 |
1600 x 1200 |
|
| NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra | 2% |
25,6% |
48% |
| NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT | 6% |
33% |
54% |
| NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT | 21% |
41% |
41% |
Overall SLI will make a pair of 6600GTs perform like an overclocked 6800 Ultra or it will let 6800GT owners run at even higher resolutions/AA modes under Half Life 2.
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JClimbs - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
A few things glossed over in the 'upgrade path' argument:costly up-front mobo purchase. These boards will go down in price, but unless they're a total flop they won't drop nearly as much as a non-SLI board's price slope.
power supply. Lets face it, when you get around to running two cards, you will need to purchase a more robust PS than those sold with most cases. If you've already spent the cash on a high-quality PS, fine; but upgrade paths are generally not pointed at folks who spend big bucks on a PS.
Fans. Two GPUs under the hood will almost certainly want more cooling. Admittedly, they're cheap. Good thing...
Electric Bill. The power draw of today's Graphics Cards is already breathtaking. With two of 'em chugging away under the hood, that drain looks absolutely scary.
Ecmaster76 - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Anyone want to bet that the two GPU's are using a hypertransport or derived interconnect. The bandwidth quoted is in the same neighborhood as an Athlon's, but probably a little faster since the trace lengths are short and straight.ChronoReverse - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
Pretty nice speed bumps, but the 6600GT sli is disappointing in how it seems to always lag behind even the 6800GT with high-resolutions and AA+AF enabled.ariafrost - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link
SLI has a lot of potential, that's for sure... :D