NVIDIA 3-Way SLI Performance Preview
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
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 Enemy Territory: Quake Wars |
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on id's radically enhanced Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some. In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two. ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs extremely large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many small textures. The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory. Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously. The game was tested with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with soft particles enabled in addition to 4X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. |
It's a recurring theme that just doesn't change. 3-Way SLI isn't helpful if you're running 1920X1200 resolution with anything less than 8X AA, or better still, 2560X1600 resolution with 4X AA or higher. At 1920X1200 with 4X AA enabled, 3-Way is slower than standard SLI, again due to increased SLI transaction workload and load-balancing. Regardless, we see similar big gains at 2560X1600 with 4X AA or 8X AA enabled, where three GeForce 8800 Ultra GPUs provide a 20 - 40% advantage over standard SLI and obviously much larger gains over a single card.
