Games used for benchmarking will be:
F.E.A.R.
One of my favorite 1st person shooters and IMO a great looking
game if you can manage to run it with all the bells and whistles
turned on. Lighting and shadow effects are what make this game
impressive, and that's also what can really put a strain on your
video card.
Doom III
Awesome visually and manages a scare or two the first time through.
D3 IMO is the best looking of the bunch, but benefits the least
from things like AA/AF due to the darkness of the game.
FarCry
Getting a little dated now, but still a great test of a video
cards capabilities. Lots of movement and great visuals.
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Not really a game, although you do get to shoot some Combine soldiers.
Utilizing HDR it provides a peak at some really good video capabilities.
Rather than using any synthetic benchmarks or benchmarking
apps like Benchemall I'll be doing what all gamers do and that's
play games. FRAPS will be used to record frames per second over
a 5 minute period over the course of three "runs" at
1600 X 1200 all three scores will be averaged for the results.
Drivers were manually configured for 4X AA/8X AF and image quality
configured for best quality. Results for SLI and non SLI mode
will be provided.
The results for the two cards in single card mode
are two close to say one is better then the other, both cards
are similarly spec'd as far as clock speeds, so there is no real
surprise in the closeness of the two. Additionally the SLI scores
may not seem off the charts, but keep in mind this was with all
the eye candy turned on (for F.E.A.R. all of the lighting and
shadow effects were turned on as well) With the drivers set to
"application preference" and letting each game auto
detect the optimal settings there's was a 50-55% increase in performance,
this however was obtained at lower AA/AF and image quality settings.
Personally the lower AA/AF settings don't bother me and that's
what I normally play at. Regardless playing in SLI mode at any
settings there's a noticeable difference in frame rates.
I did however have one small issue with running
games in SLI mode. Every game I played in SLI mode experienced
weird artifacting. This is not an issue with the card like I first
thought as you can see by the HUGE post on the Nvidia forums here.
As of now there doesn't seem to be any real fix for it,
and it effects many cards from many different brands. The only
way I was able to prevent the artifacting was to play in window
mode. In window mode everything was perfect, switching back to
full screen would result in instant artifacting.
The artifacts do not show up in a screen shot and
my camera just wouldn't pick them up. There is however a picture
on the Nvidia forums here
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