Asus Extreme N6600GT x 2 - Revisiting SLI

Name: Asus Extreme N6600GT x 2 - Revisiting SLI - Page 5
Brand: Asus

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 19, 2005, 03:00 PM EDT

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Far Cry - SFR SLI

DX9 Effects Galore.

Far Cry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene, you're probably aware that FarCry is one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Although Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are both visually impressive, Far Cry still looks great in comparison, especially with the v1.3 patch installed. FarCry came along and gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D gaming on the PC, and got even better with subsequent patches. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without AA or Aniso Filtering enabled and then with 4X AA enabled along with 8X anisotropic filtering.

Our custom FarCry benchmark proved to be somewhat of a challenge for the Asus N6600 GT, and even a pair of N6600 GTs. At a resolution of 1024x768, without any additional pixel processing, the N6600 GT performed well with a framerate just over 87 FPS. At 1600x1200 and with AA and aniso enabled at both resolutions, however, the single 6600 GT struggled a bit. Enabling SLI with a second 6600 GT, helped matters significantly, but even a pair of 6600 GTs couldn't hang with the high-end single card configurations in any of these tests.

Also notice, that in SLI mode, both the 6600 GTs and 6800 GTs lost a few frames per second at 1024x768 when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were disabled. In CPU-bound situations like this, the overhead associated with running a pair of video cards in SLI mode - specifically split-frame rendering SLI mode in this case - results in a slightly lower framerate.

Tags: Asus, sli, Xtreme, extreme, revisit, GT, XT, ting, eme

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com