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| eVGA GeForce 6600 GT and SLI against the rest of the world | |
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(Review by MS, Jan. 25, 2005) |
| GeForce 6800GT At: |
Crytek's FarCry
One issue with SFR is that the two cards have to know at all times what each of them is doing. With increasing complexity a.k.a. higher resolution and furthermore enabling features like antialiasing this can become increasingly more difficult and result in a shift in load balancing away from the optimal center line. Keep in mind that the centerline does not indicate the vertical center between the upper and lower half of the split screen, rather it shows the distribution of workload irrespective of the specific frame to be displayed. In other words, a scene with a very bland white upper half and a very complex bottom half should still show the load balancing bar in the center if everything is done correctly and the cards communicate with each other.
At 1600 x 1200 pixels with 4 x AA and 8 x AF enabled, the SLI configuration takes a nose dive. If other tasks are running in the background, or if the benchmark is repeated, the performance drops even further to around 8-10 fps average, which is indicative of a memory leak of some sort. Looking at the load distribution bar shows that one card basically has to do all the work while having to perform the additional task of babysitting the second card. One thing to note here is that the actual workload is usually displayed in the vertical bar as a brighter shade of green, in this case, there is basically no load on either graphics card, the system plain and simply appears to not know what it is doing anymore.
In summary, FarCry appears an example for an SLI implementation gone astray somehow. In view of the complexity of the graphics we understand the decision to use SFR here but maybe a reconsideration should be in place to offer at least the optional possibility of running AFR. Red: 6600 GT SLI; Turquoise: Sapphire RADEON X800 XT; Yellow: GeForce 6800GT; Blue: GeForce 6600GT Single.
| eVGA GeForce 6600GT: |
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