Athlon 64 Dual-Core Upgrade and NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB SLI - Page 5 of 9
Review By Mike Chambers - January 21, 2006
F.E.A.R. PERFORMANCE - CONTINUED
Before checking out the detailed results, let's recap the benchmarks from the previous page by showing a couple of charts that plot the relative increase in performance that a second GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB running in SLI provided in F.E.A.R.
The red line plots the increase in the average frame rate and the blue line plots the increase in the minimum frame rate. The first chart contains results from resolutions that range from 1600x1200 with no antialiasing to 2048x1536 with 2X antialiasing.
F.E.A.R. - Increase from SLI - No AA and 2X AA
As a result of SLI, the increase in the average frame rate ranges from 62% to 82%. However, note that our benchmarks also began at the high resolution of 1600x1200. The results point out that the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB running in SLI mode provides optimal performance at extremely high resolutions.
F.E.A.R. - Increase from SLI - 4X AA
The benefit of SLI continues with 4X antialaising enabled at resolutions that range from 1024x768 to 2048x1536. Even at 2048x1536 with 4X antialiasing, SLI provides a significant increase in performance as the average frame rate went up 77% and the minimum frame rate rose 64%.
F.E.A.R. DETAILED TEST RESULTS
The following table contains detailed results from the F.E.A.R. performance test. Under the columns labeled "Single GPU" and "Dual GPUs" are a set of three numbers. The first number indicates the percentage of frames that were less than 25fps, while the second and third numbers indicate the percentage of frames that were between 25 and 40fps and greater than 40fps, respectively.
F.E.A.R. Performance Test Details
The frame rate analysis gives us a better understanding of how SLI differentiates itself. For example, with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB, there are only four cases when 100% of the frames rendered exceeded 40fps. In SLI, there are seven such cases, two others at 98%, and one at 94%.
