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- Date:
- Tuesday , November 08, 2011
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 Quad SLI Video Card Review
The ASUS ROG MARS II Limited Edition video card brings true dual-GeForce GTX 580 GPUs to the table. Take two of these and you can have a true GTX 580 Quad-SLI system. We'll dive into performance, including Battlefield 3, and see what these can do directly compared to 4-way CrossFireX.
F.E.A.R. 3
F.E.A.R. 3 was released on June 22nd, 2011. This game runs in DX11, and supports Ambient Occlusion, and other effects, including a new Antialiasing method called FXAA. For our run-through we are going to play Single Player campaign on Interval 07 - Port, the next to last level. We are playing on Commando difficulty with the character Point Man. This Interval takes place in an airport, and there are effects galore and plenty of room to push these video cards. Our current run-through lasts about 11 minutes giving us ample data to dissect. The run-through starts at the beginning of the level, and we stop our benchmark once we reach the downed helicopter while looking at the crash. For more information about this game, see our F.E.A.R. 3 Gameplay Performance Review.
Highest Playable Settings
F.E.A.R. 3 is one of those games that also FXAA, and allows us to play at high resolutions like 5760x1200 with all the in-game settings at their highest values. With all four video card configurations tested here, we were able to do just that. Therefore, the game looked identical on all four video card configurations, regardless of price, simply do to the fact that even the cheapest configuration is able to run this game at the highest in-game settings at 5760x1200. From there, it is only a difference of frame rate, not gameplay experience.
Once again, it looks like AMD Radeon HD 6990 CFX Quad-GPU performance may not be living up to what it should be doing in this game. We saw performance that seemed to be on par with its single-card dual-GPU solution. ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 SLI, on the other hand, produced an average framerate of 111FPS and just blew the HD 6990 CFX out of the water in terms of performance. Though in terms of "smoothness" HD 6990 CFX is more consistent.
Looking at the single-card dual-GPU solutions, the ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 and AMD Radeon HD 6990 seemed to be right on par with each other. If you look at the graph though, you can clearly see that the HD 6990 maintains a smoother and more consistent framerate. The ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 seems to drop consistently below 60 FPS for an extended time, whereas the HD 6990 does not.
Apples-to-Apples
Quad-GPU
When we lowered the resolution to 5040x1050 with High FXAA you can really see that AMD HD 6990 CFX doesn't seem to be doing what it's supposed to. On the other hand, ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 SLI is working just fine, and provides a tremendous performance improvement.
Dual-GPU
Once again, while the ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 is technically faster than the HD 6990 in this game, the framerate pattern is certainly different. The Radeon HD 6990 is more consistent, and has less severe drops in performance.