Performance in Half-Life 2 was obtained using custom demos that were recorded by the crew over at AnandTech. The following graphics settings were enabled.
Half-Life 2 Graphics Settings
The next two bar charts contain the benchmark results at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4X antialiasing.
Half-Life 2 Performance
And 1600x1200.
Half-Life 2 Performance
To take advantage of the performance offered by the GeForce 6800 GT running in SLI, the game resolution was increased to 1920x1440 and 2X antialiasing was enabled!
Half-Life 2 Performance
How about bumping up the resolution to 2048x1536?
Half-Life 2 Performance
SLI is also effective at accelerating the performance of Half-Life 2 although not to the degree we found with Doom 3 and Far Cry. The "biggest bang for the buck" is obtained in Half-Life 2 when 4X antialiasing was enabled at higher resolutions. With 4X antialiasing enabled, the overall increase provided by SLI in the five maps tested was 13% at 1280x1024 and 39% at 1600x1200.
CONCLUSION
It's a natural progression for the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition to have an initial focus on high-end systems. Once established, we will begin to see the cross-licensing agreement between NVIDIA and Intel having a much broader impact.
There is considerable innovation with the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition as well. It will be interesting to keep an eye out on the benefits of NVIDIA's advanced memory system and MediaShield's ease of use in RAID configuration and management.
Although I have only used this system during the past six days, I threw a lot at the SLI setup by using 16X antialiasing, high quality texture filtering, and resolutions up to 2048x1536 (in Half-Life 2 no less). The system has been stable and the end results are impressive. Hard-core gamers that prefer Intel processors need to look no further than NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI to deliver the best gaming experience on the market today.
This following is a list of changes that have been made to this preview since it was originally published:
April 5, 2005 - Page 2: Added information about retail availability.
April 5, 2005 - Page 3: Included hard drive test results, recommended power supply wattage, memory voltage BIOS setting, version of games tested, and screenshots from the nTune temperature and fan control applets.
April 5, 2005 - Page 6: Added links to additional previews of the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition.
