NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2

Name: NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2 - Page 12
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, March 18, 2008, 08:00 AM EDT

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard included benchmarking model on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. We should also note that we used the latest 64-bit beta build of the program. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput.

POV-Ray

Ray Tracing Performance

We had another very tight grouping in the multi-threaded POV-Ray benchmark. It wouldn't be prudent to declare any one platform faster than another here, but the nForce 790i SLI Ultra does perform well, once again finishing just behind Intel's offering, but ahead of the previous nForces.

Kribibench v1.1

CPU-Bound 3D Rendering

For this next batch of tests, we ran Kribibench v1.1, a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the folks at Adept Development. Kribibench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported. We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16 billion polys.

As you can see, we had a problem getting Kribibench to perform well on the nForce 780i SLI and 680i SLI, but it had no problem on the nForce 790i SLI Ultra. In fact, the new ASUS and EVGA nForce 790i SLI Ultra motherboard performed at the head of the pack with the Sponge Explode model. Although, the X48 squeaked out another close one with the Ultra model.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, nforce, 790i, sli, X2, Ultra, force, 980, ULT, id, and

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