NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI for AMD Round Up: GIGABYTE, MSI and ASUS

by Jeff Bouton — Monday, October 23, 2006, 12:00 PM EDT

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Performance Comparisons with Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.

Our final round of tests will focus on gaming performance in both single and SLI modes.

Performance Comparisons with Quake 4

OpenGL Quad-Damage

Quake 4

id Software, in conjunction with developer Raven, recently released the latest addition to the wildly popular Quake franchise, Quake 4. Quake 4 is based upon an updated and slightly modified version of the Doom 3 engine, and as such performance characteristics between the two titles are very similar. Like Doom 3, Quake 4 is also an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows, but unlike Doom3, Quake 4 features some outdoor environments as well. We ran this Quake 4 benchmark using a custom timedemo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled simultaneously.

Quake 4 performance tracked closely with all three systems, as expected. Overall, the MSI K9N Diamond was the best performer once again, although the margins of all three were tight with the widest being 1.1 FPS at most.

Performance Comparisons with F.E.A.R

More Info: http://www.whatisfear.com/us/

F.E.A.R

One of the most highly anticipated titles of 2005 was Monolith's paranormal thriller F.E.A.R. Taking a look at the minimum system requirements, we see that you will need at least a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of system memory and a 64MB graphics card, that is a Radeon 9000 or GeForce4 Ti-class or better, to adequately run the game. Using the full retail release of the game patched to v1.03, we put the graphics cards in this review through their paces to see how they fared with a popular title. Here, all graphics settings within the game were set to the maximum values, but with soft shadows disabled (Soft shadows and anti-aliasing do not work together currently). Benchmark runs were then completed at a resolution 1600x1200, with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

F.E.A.R. testing delivered a familiar picture, with each test-bed keeping things nip and tuck. In non-SLI testing, the GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 managed the best score while SLI testing had the MSI K9N Diamond in the lead once again. In the big picture, these results are all very close, with the differences being imperceptible in real world usage.