Asus Extreme N6600GT x 2 - Revisiting SLI

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.