NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS: Unified Powerhouses

SLI was not quite ready for prime-time with initial driver release NVIDIA provided to analysts (v96.94), but a few days ago NVIDIA came though with an updated driver that was SLI capable (v96.97). Some functions are still currently disabled, like SLIAA for example, but the driver was stable and worked perfectly throughout a short run with some various benchmarks.

We ran a handful of benchmarks using a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS and GeForce 8800 GTX cards and have a quick comparison available below.  When looking at the graphs, please note that we're comparing single-card performance versus SLI - GeForce 8800 GTS and 8800 GTX numbers are separated into two separate graphs. All of the tests were run at the same resolution and settings (1920x1200 | 4XAA/16X Aniso), with the exception of the 3DMark06 test which represents a default benchmark run (1280x1024).

Performance Comparisons: Single-Card vs. SLI Double Your Pleasure, Double The Fun

Performance scaled very well with the GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX cards running in SLI mode, especially in the Prey and F.E.A.R. benchmarks. Those two games in particular showed massive performance improvements with two GPUs sharing the rendering workload. Even at this early stage of driver development (relatively speaking), NVIDIA seems to have SLI working well with the GeForce 8800 series, at least from a performance perspective. And we suspect that things will only get better moving forward, as NVIDIA's driver team gets more familiar with the intricacies of their latest GPU.