NVIDIA Forceware v77.7x: New SLI AA Modes & Mainstream SLI

Name: NVIDIA Forceware v77.7x: New SLI AA Modes & Mainstream SLI - Page 6
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, July 19, 2005, 12:00 PM EDT

AA Performance: Doom 3

Page 6: AA Performance: Doom 3

Performance Comparisons with Doom 3 - Single Player

Details: http://www.doom3.com/

Doom 3

id Software's games have long been pushing the limits of 3D graphics. Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 were all instrumental in the success of 3D accelerators on the PC. Now, many years later, with virtually every new desktop computer shipping with some sort of 3D accelerator, id is at it again with the visually stunning Doom 3. Like most of id's previous titles, Doom 3 is an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows. We ran this batch of Doom 3 single player benchmarks using a custom demo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 without anti-aliasing enabled and then again with 4X, SLI 8X and SLI 16X AA and 8X aniso enabled simultaneously.

RED=SLI 8X AA / TAN=SLI 16X AA

RED=SLI 8X AA / TAN=SLI 16X AA

RED=SLI 8X AA / TAN=SLI 16X AA

Performance in Doom 3 with SLI Anti-Aliasing enabled, looks nothing like it did with Half Life 2. This is because Doom 3 is largely GPU bound, so the performance hit associated with enabling anti-aliasing is going to be much more dramatic. Doom 3 isnt' the type of game SLI AA was designed for, but we wanted to give you all a frame of reference anyway. Here, at both resolutions, SLI 8X anti-aliasing was about half as fast as 4X anti-aliasing, and SLI 16X was roughly 1/3rd as fast. With a game like Doom 3, however, SLI Anti-Aliasing isn't the best choice. Instead, running a pair of GeForce cards in multi-GPU SLI mode, and cranking up the resolution is a much better idea.