NVIDIA's GeForce 6 SLI: Demolishing Performance Barriers
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 23, 2004 10:23 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Unreal Tournament 2004 Performance
In UT2004 we see that even up to 1600 x 1200 we’re basically CPU bound with the higher end GPUs. The 6600GT is the only GPU that shows a performance improvement due to SLI, at 1600 x 1200 the gain is just under 16%.
What’s interesting to note is that SLI is slightly slower at CPU bound resolutions than just a single card configuration; we ran the single card configurations in PCI Express x8 mode (just like the SLI cards run), so the performance difference, although negligible, is completely due to SLI driver and GPU bridge overhead.
It isn’t until we hit 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 8X AF that we see a real performance gain from SLI.
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Kolbe - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
BUYER BEWARE!!first, I have this ASUS motherboard and two GigaByte 6600GT's. AFter countless hours of trying to get this to work AND of course upgrading bios and drivers, I came to find out that these two gigabyte cards are not certified by Nvidia and they will not work in the sli mode on this ASUS board. ASUS has not returned my calls or my emails, but gigabyte, bless their hearts, wrote me back and said in essence: "our 6600GT cards work on OUR board" so too bad. Thank God for Newegg and their awesome return policy. I am returning these two and getting one 6800 GT, but of course, not from Gigabyte!
mashie - Sunday, December 5, 2004 - link
It would be nice to see tests at 2048x1536. After all if you can afford the videocards for SLI I bet you can get a proper monitor as well ;)Denial - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link
Again, why no vanilla 6800's? How would they compete with the 6600GT's in SLI? This is starting to get rediculous.nserra - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
Sorry forgot link.http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/...
nserra - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
#69 Yeah i agree.But let me tell you i already see something that SLI will give me.
Having a 6600 and a X700 on the same PC.
piroroadkill - Friday, November 26, 2004 - link
I don't know if anyone's said this, but SLI is an absolutely stupid idea, why on earth don't they take the 3Dfx Voodoo5 approach and just stick two GPUs on one card? Surely this would yield similar benefits without special mobo requirements.. 16x PCIe is easily enough bandwidth to cope... then just double the amount of RAM on the card and surely this is more viable solution? sure it'd be an insanely costly card, but still cheaper than an SLI setup, and lets face it, once a single card can outpace your shiny new SLI setup, that SLI setup is going to look poor value for money and you're just going to waste both cards, it seems obscene.stance - Thursday, November 25, 2004 - link
will the new duel core amd cpus that come out mext year be supported by this motherboardstance - Thursday, November 25, 2004 - link
tombman - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
ANAND, please answer:1.) Can you really force SLI for games with no profile in the driver?
2.) please make 2048x1536 or higher Tests (my CRT can da 2304x1440 :D)
3.) please make 8xAA Tests
4.) please check if HDR (high dynamic range rendering) in far cry works in SLI mode (other sites say no)
Especially # 1.) is very important.
If only games with a profile can run in SLI mode, SLI will not become very popular imo. We know nvidia- they will only have profiles for benchmarks and most common hyped games. For not so popular games there surely will be no profiles...
thx
tombman - Wednesday, November 24, 2004 - link
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