Date:
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA SLI Support - Getting Better

A new driver from NVIDIA has improved SLI support and brought new features to the table. Inside we not only test this latest driver, focusing on SLI support and performance, but we also comment on what we would like to see in future iterations of NVIDIA’s SLI.

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System Test Setup:

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4), AMD Athlon 64 FX-55, 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400 Cas2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

For our system platform setup, we used the ASUS A8N-SLI PCI Express platform with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 CPU at default speeds so that the CPU wouldn’t be so much of a bottleneck to these fast video cards.

What we are going to do in this editorial is go back and test those games we tested previously in our first editorial and see if SLI works. We will do a quick SLI performance test in six of the current games we use in our regular video card reviews and see what benefit there is from using SLI. Then we will go and test the rest of the games we had on our original table and see if SLI works in them and present our findings in a new, updated table.

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For this test, we simply took two reference NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards and downclocked them to GeForce 6800 GT speeds of 350MHz / 1GHz. We first evaluated game performance with a single card and then put them both in SLI mode and tested game performance again. Since Coolbits doesn’t seem to work with this driver when both cards are in SLI, we used RivaTuner because it allowed us to disable the internal clock check and clock the video cards at 6800 GT speeds.