Conclusion
For those who were hoping that Nvidia’s newest incarnation of Quad SLI would deliver mammoth frame rate increases to some of the toughest PC games on the market, we have disappointing news: it won’t. In fact, the harsh reality is that two 9800 GX2 cards will actually deliver a lower performance on some games than 3-way SLI.
To be sure, we check our results with Falcon Northwest and confirmed that the scores were legitimate rather than some bizarre anomaly. However, we’re still struggling to figure out why Nvidia’s highly touted new line of graphics cards stumbled in our tests. Remember that the 9800 GX2’s stream processors and framebuffer advantage were supposed to the card up to a 50 percent performance increase over a single 8800 Ultra. In addition, the 9800 GX2’s 4-way AFR was supposed to make a Quad SLI configuration work more intelligently by dividing and conquering the workload. So why didn’t Quad SLI live up to the hype?
Obviously, the beta drivers for these new cards could be a factor; drivers have certainly caused some headaches of late with other SLI types and high-end games like Crysis. It also appears that memory is a significant factor; while the 8800 Ultras each had 768 MB of memory, the 1 GB of memory per 9800 GX2 is essentially split in half and thus gives each GPU just 512 MB. Also, the Ultras brought a slightly higher clock speed and RAM to the contest.
A single 9800 GX2 on its own is a formidable graphics card, but users should be warned that investing in another card won’t blow the doors off a system. In fact, we may characterize Quad SLI with two 9800 GX2s as a comparable and cheaper alternative to an expensive 3-way SLI configuration – one that will save you both some space inside your system and some money in your wallet. Quad SLI with 9800 GX2s is still in its infancy, so we expect that Nvidia will deliver improvements to this configuration as time goes on. But if it’s vastly superior performance gamers are looking for, then they’re advised to wait for the forthcoming release of Nvidia’s GTX 280 model.
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Why not a test a game that isn't limited by CPU...like Cryshit
Care to actually explain why the FNW system got such low CPU utilisation on HD playback?
It would be nice to see the HD resolutions listed regularly (1920 x 1080) as people with this much grunt are undoubtedly using their PCs on HD TVs @ 1080p. I mean who on earth plays at resolutions over 2000 pixels wide?
I'm amazed at the poor selction of games that they have chosen to benchmark on. I mean 3 old games and 2 very CPU bound games. I seriously have no idea what they where thinking. Nobody is every going to get a quad/tri SLI setup and then go and play serious sam 2. I really hope they redo this with some good benchmarks: 3DMark Vantage, Crysis, Company of Heroes: OF and maybe Oblivion and UT3.
omg...where's crysis, where's ut3...hell where is oblivion?!
I thought this was supposed to be a thorough test, not just a means to show that quad-SLI performs less than 3-way SLI in SOME game titles...
i would like to comment, but i would just repeat whats already been said, this review gets two thumbs down.
Worst review ever.
Why did they test 3 ultra's against essentialy 4 8800GTS 512's. Also its not an equal test because the two system are different, they should have used the same mobo, processor, ram and hdd etc