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Exclusive: SLI Head-to-Head: Monarch Micro-ATX vs. Shuttle SFF

 by Jarred Walton on March 6, 2006 8:56 AM EST
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Day of Defeat: Source Performance

Day of Defeat: Source gives us a different look at the performance of Valve's Source engine. With HDR effects and a multiplayer focus, frame rates are typically quite a bit lower than Half-Life 2. Can we shift the bottleneck from the processor to the graphics cards? There's only one way to find out...

At maximum detail, the GTX KO SLI configuration finally takes the lead, with the crossover point at 1280x1024 4xAA. We're still pretty CPU limited with such a configuration, but hopefully future games from Valve and their partners using the Source engine will be able to benefit more from faster graphics cards. Or, you can take the other viewpoint and congratulate Valve for not requiring people to have $1000 worth of graphics power.

Half-Life 2 Performance FEAR 1.03 Performance
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  • JarredWalton - Monday, March 6, 2006 - link

    HDCP support is a graphics/display issue. As has been reported, HDCP is not supported on any current retail graphics cards. It's also not supported under Windows XP. We should start seeing HDCP enabled cards (meaning, with the necessary decryption chip) in the near future. The GPUs are ready, but they still need the appropriate chip soldered onto the boards.

    Personally, I'm really not happy with HDCP at all, so I'm doing my best to avoid it. 1280x720 DivX looks quite nice and runs flawlessly on current hardware. Here's an example from the olympics (18GB compressed to 4.5GB 1280x720):

    http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/multimedia/tvt...">2006 Olympics Men's Hockey Gold Match

  • AGAC - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link

    Hey, what's to love about HDCP. That said, it seems that we just will have to swallow that frog... I mean, DivX does look nice indeed. The problem is availability of mainstream content. I think it's going to be a very cold day in hell before you can walk in the regular video rental and get the latest blockbuster title in beautiful DivX 1280x720.

    DHCP will be broken, we all know that. It only harms the legal user because one will have to upgrade video cards, monitors and god knows what more will not be HDCP compliant. Thanks for the your tip and simpathy. Keep up the good work.

    AGAC

  • DigitalFreak - Monday, March 6, 2006 - link

    NT
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