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 . 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

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