ASUS MARS II Review: GTX 580 SLI On One PCB

Name: ASUS MARS II Geforce GTX 580 SLI
Brand: ASUS

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, August 26, 2011, 12:01 AM EDT

FarCry 2

DirectX Gaming Performance

FarCry 2

Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions with 4X AA enabled.

FarCry 2 was essentially CPU bound at 1920x1200 and all of the high-end, dual-GPU cards finished within a couple of frames per second of one another. At the higher resolution, the MARS II and GeForce GTX 590 distanced themselves from the Radeons and the GTX 590 notched out a victory.

Tags: Nvidia, Asus, GeForce, Gaming, graphics, GPU, sli, mars, GTX 580

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