Fair to bench SLI with non-SLI?

[GTaudiophile]

Tech Report: ATI X850 XT vs. GF6800U SLI

How much did NVDA pay to have those thrown in?

 

[GTaudiophile]

WTF? How can one X850 XT beat two GF6800Us in SLI in HL2???

Text

 

[biostud]

They're both too expensive for me to care

 

[GTaudiophile]

Anand's review of the X850 / Fall Refresh from ATI.

 

[LTC8K6]

It really doesn't look like SLI is worth it to me going by all of those benches.

 

[Acanthus]

In most of those benches the SLI setup and X850 are both cpu limited. Only at 1600x1200 4x8x does SLI shine. The X850s stronger benchmarks are all at low resolutions with no AA/AF and the CPU/chipset overhead of SLI shows when the bench is CPU limited.

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

Gaming sites glamorize running the most AA/AF. They're making it difficult for home users to run the same benchmarks and compare apples to apples. Everycard has a different AA/AF setting, and you can't compare FPS. You can't even get the same benchmarks they run. It's getting rediculous.

Anyway, my single 6800 Ultra water block is right there with the SLI version. I was expecting SLI to have at least a 50% increase in FPS, but that's not happening, it's more like 25%. If anyone is looking to buy a killer rig right now, I'd tell them to stick when an FX55 and 6800 Ultra OC and not worry about waiting for SLI.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Fair to bench SLI with non-SLI?

They say all is fair in love and war, and this is definitely war Most corporations are run like military campaigns, unfortunately for nV their latest offensive hasn't had much shock&awe outside of pricing

 

[jpeyton]

If anyone was paying attention to the benches with SLI vs. an X800XTPE, you'd see that the XTPE keeps up very well for only having one GPU. That's why I found it very uncompelling to go SLI, considering the added costs of the video card, motherboard, and power supply.

 

[BentValve]

SLI may not be impressive in benchmarks but I bet the overall game play is considerably better than a single 6800 GT/Ultra or X800XT.

 

[jpeyton]

Originally posted by: BentValve
SLI may not be impressive in benchmarks but I bet the overall game play is considerably better than a single 6800 GT/Ultra or X800XT.

If the TR showed min/max framerates as well, maybe we'd know for sure.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Anyway, my single 6800 Ultra water block is right there with the SLI version.

I would watch very closely what driver revisions sites are using when looking at SLI benches. If you look around you'll see that most of the pre 69.33 version tests show something quite different then what is happening now using the most up to date drivers. SLI is going to be very driver dependant for some time.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Yep, if there is anything I've learned about nV, it's that performance always gets better as drivers mature. My 5800U saw some very nice boosts over time from driver updates

 

[Caveman]

The 6800 Ultra SLI scored lower than the 6800 Ultra by itself...

Obviously, the game is not written to take advantage of SLI and... the drivers need to mature before making any conclusions...

 

[klah]

Fair to bench SLI with non-SLI?

When the street price for an XTPE is $900+ I would say yes.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Caveman
The 6800 Ultra SLI scored lower than the 6800 Ultra by itself...

Obviously, the game is not written to take advantage of SLI and... the drivers need to mature before making any conclusions...

Uh, maybe you should look at *all* the benchmarks. When CPU-limited (which, in many games, means any settings without AA/AF, and even then maybe up to 1280x1024), SLI is a little slower than a single card, because of the extra overhead from SLI itself. When GPU-limited, the SLI setup is *far* faster than the single 6800GT/6800U.

 

[formulav8]

People, as Matthias said above, anytime a game shows a single card, especially the same card beating or equalling the Sli setup, you can almost bet that it is the CPU that is LIMITED! Not that the video card is faster than the sli setup. Just use alittle bit of common sense




Jason

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
In most of those benches the SLI setup and X850 are both cpu limited. Only at 1600x1200 4x8x does SLI shine. The X850s stronger benchmarks are all at low resolutions with no AA/AF and the CPU/chipset overhead of SLI shows when the bench is CPU limited.

Quoted for accuracy. As for the topic at hand, when we're talking about such high-end cards, I think it's perfectly fair to throw in SLI setups.