SLI gaming benchmarks
Gaming benchmarks were carried out at 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. Image quality was raised by applying 4x AntiAliaing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering to each setting. Both NVIDIA SLI systems' ATI RADEON X850 XT PE cards were replaced by 2 reference NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI-Express cards that were run in SLI mode. Further, the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition was run with a single GeForce 6800 GT, to see what kind of performance increase 2 SLI'd cards gave. We'd expect the AMD system, run with a potent Athlon 64 FX-53 CPU, to come out on top when tested at lower resolutions. The gap should close as the tests become increasinly more card-limited.Firstly, 3DMark05 v1.2.0
The performance gap between the two SLI'd systems remains roughly the same at each tested resolution. It seems as if the Intel Edition isn't quite putting out the kind of performance we'd expect to see at 1600x1200. It's not bad by any means, and far, far higher than a single 6800 GT's performance, but we feel it should be at least another couple of hundred marks closer to the score posted by the AMD system.
The DOOM 3 graph is just how you'd expect the SLI graphs to look like. There's a performance discrepancy at the lowest-tested setting that can be explained away by the FX-53's sheer gaming grunt. The gap closes as the benchmark becomes more system-limited.
It's all pretty close in AquaMark 3, too.