Date:
Tuesday , April 05, 2005
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition

NVIDIA today officially enters a new market. They will now be going head to head with Intel, building motherboard chipsets for Intel processors. NVIDIA comes out swinging firmly at the high end with an SLI chipset that looks to be very strong.

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DOOM 3

(OpenGL)

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We are using the full retail version of DOOM 3 and leaving each video cards driver control panel to “Application Preference” for AA and AF. We set the DOOM 3 in-game quality setting and resolution that played the best on each card. We utilized the in-game DOOM 3 AA setting to change AA level.

For our manual run-through, we chose the “Enpro” level and used FRAPS to capture the framerate every second and started our run-through from the beginning to half way through the mission. We played the game in a normal fashion, which means each run-through on each card will be a little different, but still represents the same course through the level.

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In DOOM 3 we found both platforms playable at the same in-game quality settings. At 1600x1200 with 4XAA and 8XAF enabled the two 6800 Ultras in SLI on the Intel platform offered up very strong performance in this game. The average framerate was near the cap of 60FPS; the minimum framerate never dropped below 30FPS. Looking at the graph and the table you can see that the AMD platform is slightly stronger, but not by any real noticeable margin.

We did try “Ultra” quality mode on both platforms at 1600x1200 with 4XAA and 8XAF. We found that the framerates were very high and playable on each platform. However, we found that there was quite a bit of hitching as you move through the game, which distracted from the gameplay. Overall we felt “High Quality” was the best mode at the very high resolution of 1600x1200 with 4XAA and 8XAF.

Apples to Apples Timedemo:

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We ran the built in timedemo “demo1” in DOOM 3 to see how the average framerate compared in the recorded demo. You can see that at 1600x1200 with 4XAA and 8XAF the AMD FX-55 platform is almost 6% faster in DOOM 3.