NVIDIA's GeForce 6 SLI: Demolishing Performance Barriers
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 23, 2004 10:23 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Battlefield: Vietnam Performance
For our final benchmark we only looked at performance at 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 8X AF enabled.
The performance improvement due to SLI is pretty strong as you would expect at such a high resolution. The 6600GT moves up 57%, while the 6800GT and Ultra gain an impressive 71% from SLI mode.
The 6600GT in SLI mode comes close to the performance of a single 6800GT, but not equal unfortunately. Both the 6800GT and the 6800 Ultra reach very playable frame rates thanks to SLI.
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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