Date:
Tuesday , April 22, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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XFX GeForce 9800 GTX SLI

What kind of gameplay experience does GeForce 9800 GTX SLI provide? We evaluate two retail XFX GeForce 9800 GTX video cards on an SLI platform and compare those to GeForce 9800 GX2, GeForce 8800 GTX SLI, and AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X2 CrossFireX.

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System Test Setup

We will be using a quad-core CPU based platform with the new EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs. The AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 CrossFireX platform will be tested on an ASUS P5E3 Premium Intel X48 motherboard with the same CPU and RAM.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

For all NVIDIA GPU based video cards we are using the latest beta drivers, 174.74. This new driver now supports GeForce 8 series video cards. We are using Catalyst 8.3 for the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 CrossFireX setup. We have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista x64 installed.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page.

In our tables and graphs in this evaluation the abbreviation “TRMS” Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling setting for Transparency AA. “TRSS” indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling. “ADSS” indicates the use of AMD’s Adaptive Supersampling.