Date:
Tuesday , November 08, 2011
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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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.

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DiRT 3

DiRT 3 was released on May 24th, 2011. DiRT 3 is the sequel to DiRT 2 which we have used extensively in the past. We are using this game all patched up to the recent patch, and we are running in DX11 with all "Ultra" settings.

For our run-through we are going to play Single Player and then a Single Race. We are going to the Trailblazer discipline, and we are going to run in Finland and on the Paijanne Approach track with a modern vehicle class with morning sun. We've tested all tracks, and this one seems to be the track that is the most graphical demanding. For more information about this game, see our DiRT3 Gameplay Performance Review.

Highest Playable Settings

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DiRT 3 doesn't seem to be that sensitive to VRAM bottlenecks, like some other games previously tested. We were able to run at 8X MSAA at 5760x1200 with ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 SLI without any trouble at all at highest settings. This is the highest possible MSAA settings with this game, and the experience was smooth and consistent. We were also able to play at the same settings with Radeon HD 6990 CFX. Here, you can see Quad-GPU performance is finally working, unlike the last two games. Though it is working, those two ASUS ROG MARS II video cards were just able to provide a bit more performance at this resolution in this game.

Moving down to the single-card dual-GPU solutions, we found that we were able to play at 4X MSAA on both at 5760x1200. We tried 8X MSAA on both, but the performance just wasn't there, the game started to feel rather jerky. At 4X AA this smoothed out and was playable. ASUS ROG MARS II continues to take a performance lead over the Radeon HD 6990 in this game.

Apples-to-Apples

Quad-GPU

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Lowering the resolution to 5040x1050 evened out performance a bit between the two configurations, but ASUS MARS II GTX 580 SLI was still technically faster.

Dual-GPU

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We didn't expect this, but lowering the resolution has caused the ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 SLI video card to take a larger lead over the Radeon HD 6990 than we would have expected.