Synthetic and Demo Performance
Test Setup and benching methodology: For all synthetics and demos I used the default rendering method available to ensure valid and comparable results. The old Madonion in me wanting the best performance set the Quality tab to
High Performance for benchmarks in Aquamark, and the 3dmark applications. Any other changes will be denoted by the graph illustration.
Athlon 64 3800+ @ 2.4 Ghz
Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
1 Gig DDR400 (Dual Channel) CAS 2.5
Dual 6600GT's
Drivers
Nforce 6.39 Platform Drivers
Nvidia 71.80 Display Driver
3dmark2001SE
3dmark2001SE: 3dmark2001SE is remarkably CPU bound platform. It has actually been used for studying CPU performance in many cases. However certain tests within the application still show notable GPU bound tests. These tests are illustrated above. It should be noted that the shader power of an SLI setup is substancially increased to a single GPU. Paticularly last generation.
Nvidia Optimised Profile
3dmark2003
3dmark03: 3dmark03 is almost a completely GPU bound software. Showing very little CPU reliance it is an excellent test for pure GPU bound benchmarks. As can be seen by the tests illustrated here. A Second GPU can significantly increase potential of this benchmark. Once again suggesting more shader limited scenerios will greatly benefit from an SLI setup.
Nvidia Optimised Profile
3dmark2005
3dmark05: The latest introduction of 3dmark available. This benchmark minimum requirement for all game tests is Shader model 2.0. It is custom optimised to include SM 3.0 profiles for its tests. Once again we can see that Dual GPUS produces a pretty respectable gain for shader limited situations. The demo is probably using an optimised version of AFR if you note its vertex performance.
Nvidia Optimised Profile
Aquamark
Aquamark3: Aquamark3 shows what we have seen in previous synthetic tests. A second GPU will produce pretty significant gains for the the application. An interesting note is the CPU score. It would appear SLI creates a small CPU overhead CPU limited situation. This will probably be observed in gaming enviroments when you are limited by your CPU rather than your graphic card.
Alternative Frame Rendering Profile
Nvidia and ATI tech demos.
Tech Demos: Having real benefits in synthetics I wanted to see if I could reproduce the performance in other shader tech demos released by ATI and Nvidia. The SLI profiles for these demos have been forced by me using the applications listed in the first post. The tech demos reproduce what we have seen in the synthetic benchmarks. SLI greatly benefits shader limited situations.
Profiles listed in graph