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BFGTech 9600 GT OC in SLI vs. GeForce 8800 GTX

Will two BFGTech GeForce 9600 GT OC video cards SLI'd offer a better gaming experience than a GeForce 8800 GTX? NVIDIA thinks so. Let’s see what the real-world differences are with 9600 GT SLI and an 8800 GTX in Crysis, COD 4 & UT3.

Crysis

(DirectX 10)

We are using the full version of Crysis. Crysis is a first person shooter that is set in 2019. What makes Crysis unique is the amazing destructible environment and the on the fly customizability of your character and your weapons. Then there is always the graphics quality that will bring even the top end video cards to their knees. We will be playing Crysis in the default APIs for our system, which launches automatically in DX10 mode with the 64-bit executable. We have applied the latest Patch version 1.2 for Crysis which was just released last week.

As you progress through Crysis the game becomes more graphically demanding; first the scenic vistas, then the weather effects, and finally the final boss all lead your optimized playable settings of the first few levels to become unplayable. Our run-through in the graphs below involves 10 minutes of gameplay in “Assault_Crysis” the Harbor map. This map includes the transition from night to day, tons of explosions, particles, physics, AI interaction and water.

Note that in the graphs, we have lowered our redline to 25 FPS for Crysis. This game is demanding, and low framerates are impossible to avoid, gameplay is also different in this game to where 25 FPS and up feels very playable, very likely due to the efficient use of motion blur. Note that the down-spikes to 0 FPS in the graphs are due to the saved game points.

As noted above we are using the latest and greatest patch version 1.2 for this evaluation along with the absolute latest drivers for both video cards. Overall we found the BFGTech GeForce 9600 GT OC SLI experience to be very smooth and stable.

If you recall back to our initial evaluation of one BFGTech GeForce 9600 GT OC we found 1280x1024 to be the highest playable resolution with a few options on “High” but the all important shaders quality on “Medium.” Well, with two BFGTech GeForce 9600 GT OC cards in SLI we found we were able to increase the resolution easily to 1600x1200 as well as have shaders quality enabled on “High.” The only downside was having to lower texture quality to “Medium” versus “High” at 1280x1024.

Even with two cards in SLI having this texture setting on “High” at 1600x1200 with “High” shaders quality had a noticeable impact on the “smoothness” of this game, which can only be felt when actually playing the game. Our theory is that since each GPU has to replicate textures (512MB framebuffer and 256-bit memory bus to each GPU) this might be causing enough of a bottleneck to reduce the experience at these settings in Crysis. Mostly we are concerned more about the narrow 256-bit memory bus rather than the 512MB of RAM to each GPU. Regardless, the ability to enable “High” shaders quality more than makes up for having to turn the texture quality to “Medium.”

The GeForce 8800 GTX was also able to play easily at 1600x1200 with “High” shaders quality. Where it differed though was its ability to play with “High” texture quality without any slowdowns. We compared performance between “Medium” and “High” texture quality on the GeForce 8800 GTX and found that the “High” setting had no impact on performance. The larger framebuffer, 768MB, combined with the wider 384-bit bus and higher memory bandwidth allows for the GTX to use “High” texture quality at 1600x1200 along with “High” shaders quality.

Therefore, in the case of Crysis, two BFGTech GeForce 9600 GT OC cards in SLI do not allow a better gaming experience compared to a GeForce 8800 GTX. However, 9600 GT SLI does come very close, with only one in-game setting separating the two. It is also completely possible that the slowdowns with texture quality at “High” at 1600x1200 with shaders at “High” could be attributed to the fact that multi-GPU performance isn’t exactly as efficient in Crysis as it is in other games. It is possible driver and or game patches may improve SLI performance, and if that is the case, it might very much match a stock GTX in time.