Understanding the Gaming Charts

I was reading this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] 6,745.html

and saw that some cards says: SLI. My friend says that SLI means 2 cards in SLI mode. But, if you check it says:

NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTS 76.40 frames per second

and below says

NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTS SLI 49.30 frames per second


So, I think that it refers to a ONE card sli-capable... but just one card. Not 2 cards in SLI mode. Am I right?


Another example:

At the top of the chart says:

NVIDIA Geforce 8800 Ultra SLI 137.50 FPS

and below says:

NVIDIA Geforce 8800 Ultra 3SLI 136.00 FPS


I don't think that it refers to a 3 cards in 3SLI mode... just one card with a sli connector available.

Am I right???

SLI means two cards, 3SLI means 3 cards.

In the first example, you are being confused by NVIDIA's naming scheme. If you look under the card name you'll see that the higher framerate card has 512MB of VRAM. It is in fact a different GPU as well, G92 instead of G80. The SLI configuration is two 320MB GTSs which are older (based on G80) and had a few weird bugs.

In the second example, you're looking at a CPU bottleneck, and margin of variation between benchmark runs.

I believe they merged the single and dual charts at some point this year.