System Setup and Notes
Hardware
ASUS A8N-E SLI, NVIDIA nForce4 SLI, PEG16X x 2, DDR, Socket 939
AMD Athlon FX-55, 2600MHz, 1MB L2, dual-channel memory
2 x GeForce 6800 Ultra reference boards, 440/1130, PEG16X, 256MB
2 x 512MB Corsair XMS3200C2 DDR400, 2-3-2-6
Tagan TG480-U01 ATX PSU
Software
Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0C
NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93
Shadermark 2.1
D3D RightMark 1.0.5.0 ( Public Beta 4 )
Humus's GL_EXT_reme
Futuremark's 3DMark 2001 and 3DMark05
Valve's Half Life 2
iD Software's Doom 3
Crytek's Far Cry
Notes
I'll say it here, and NVIDIA won't like me for it, but SLI at a driver level isn't stable yet. Testing has been frought with crashes, heat related issues from a pair of Ultras in close proximity, at full speed, and general teething troubles. In my experience testing hardware, there's some serious work still to be done at a driver level, and work to get the bridge silicon on nForce4 up to scratch. However, when the system wasn't BSOD'ing, SLI behaved very well with 66.93. With 66.75 there was some serious degrading of performance with Source-engine games for example, which has now disappeared. So progress is being made.Performance is also incredibly variable between driver releases. So while I'll show you performance with Ultras today, and the other cards in coming days with the same driver, performance will change before you can buy SLI hardware at retail. Bear that in mind. SLI modes change between driver releases and everything is generally in a state of quite extreme flux just now. We'll track SLI for you at a driver level starting with 66.93, to let you know what's what.
So let's start with theoretical performance and see how theoretical pixel and geometry performance scales with SLI using the two modes and our testing platform, in Rightmark.
