Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts


GeForce 9800 GTX SLI is slightly faster than Radeon HD 4870 here, even when both the AMD 780FX and nForce 780a SLI MCP are both running dual PCI-Express 2.0 x16 lanes for the graphics. Both are also notably faster than the 780G in CrossFire as well, however the 780G chipset was not particularly designed to accommodate it, Gigabyte merely hacks the motherboard to do it.

It's interesting to note that both Crysis and World in Conflict both come out slower when running either CrossFire or SLI under the same settings. Since it's cross multi-GPU platform we have ruled out a driver issue (and plus it scales nicely on Intel boards), so we can only assume the CPU is the limitation here - the SLI data simply isn't processed fast enough, regardless of platform.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Publisher: Activision


With the same settings we finally see scaling with SLI and CrossFire, with SLI coming out a wedge faster than both CrossFire boards. It seems that the CPU performance doesn't affect ET:QW as much because both the AMD 780G with Phenom X3 8750 and AMD 790FX with Phenom X4 9850 both perform almost identically.

World in Conflict

Publisher: Sierra


Again we see the performance drop compared to single card resolutions. Basically, we cannot recommend multi-GPU for AMD CPU, making the nForce 780a SLI MCP and AMD 790FX kind of defunct as performance platforms.