Quad SLI: GeForce 7900 GX2

Gameplay Evaluations - How We Tested:

There are no timedemos used in our evaluations - we're focusing on the real-world gameplay experience. Ultimately, this is what should determine your next video card purchase.

We have split this video card evaluation into two sections. Four games are tested in our "Highest Playable" detail settings, taking both 30" and 24" widescreen LCD gamers into account. The second part of our evaluation focuses on apples to apples comparisons.

Because the benchmarks are done manually, there are slight differences between runs. However, we have run each benchmarking scenario through enough times to get consistent average and minimum frame rates. We recorded results for comparison at 2560x1600, 1920x1200 and 1600x1200 in the apples to apples section.

In the "Highest Playable" section of the evaluation, you will not go far wrong by following the logic that the higher the resolution and in game details, the faster the graphics solution in that particular title.

Scan 3XS Quad SLI Panther System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (operating at 2600MHz, 13x200MHz); ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS4000 Pro (operating in dual channel at 200MHz with 2.0-3-3-7 1T timings); 2 x Western Digital Raptor 150GB, 10000RPM SATA 150 Hard disk drives in RAID 0; Tagan TurboJet 900W Quad SLI Power Supply; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c, NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 standalone version 6.82 WHQL; NVIDIA Forceware version 87.25 WHQL.

NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX SLI System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (operating at 2600MHz, 13x200MHz); ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS4000 Pro (operating in dual channel at 200MHz with 2.0-3-3-7 1T timings); Western Digital Raptor 74GB, 10000RPM SATA 150 Hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W Power Supply; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 standalone version 6.82 WHQL; NVIDIA beta Forceware version 84.43.


We enabled high quality driver settings on NVIDIA hardware to remove the harsh optimisations that are evident in several of today's games. We feel that if you're spending a hell of a lot of money on your video card subsystem, you're going to be looking for no compromises image quality. As aforementioned, we were disappointed to find out that there were no improvements in filtering quality, especially when ATI has a quality setting that NVIDIA really can't touch with its current hardware.

You can read more about the filtering quality differences here


We use the following abbreviations on our best-playable settings tables:

• TSS AA - Transparency SuperSampled antialiasing (NVIDIA GeForce 7 series);
  
• TMS AA - Transparency MultiSampled antialiasing (NVIDIA GeForce 7 series);
  
• SLI AA - SLI Antialiasing (NVIDIA GeForce 7 series);

Why no CrossFire?

Due to the massive amount of time it took us to successfully benchmark the GeForce 7900 GX2 Quad SLI system, we were left with a limited amount of time to test both Radeon X1900 CrossFire and GeForce 7900 GTX SLI. We encountered some teething problems with CrossFire, whereby we couldn't get the expected performance in F.E.A.R. at 2560x1600 and we were having issues setting both antialiasing and anisotropic filtering via the control panel in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

We were using the Catalyst 6.3 WHQL driver along with the 'Chuck' patch to enable HDR+AA in Oblivion. We're working with ATI to solve our problems, but for now, we decided to start by comparing Quad SLI with its dual-card cousin, GeForce 7900 GTX SLI.