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9800 GTX vs. SLI vs. 3-way SLI. vs. Quad SLI

How does a 9800 GTX compare to SLI, 3-way SLI, and Quad SLI? We have completed an SLI scaling evaluation using our real world gameplay techniques as well as apples-to-apples testing to see what SLI, 3-way SLI, and Quad SLI can do to improve your gameplay experience.

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 hotfix patch version 1.2.1 for Crysis.

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 simulations.

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.

The very first thing we have to say, since it was fairly major, was how well SLI and 3-way SLI scaled in Crysis. It was only a few months ago we were saying how SLI did not scale well in Crysis, but thanks to game patches and newer drivers we are seeing better performance scaling with SLI, however, there are still some limits beyond 9800 GTX SLI.

GeForce 9800 GTX

A GeForce 9800 GTX was able to play Crysis well at 1600x1200 with 16X AF with Shaders Quality at “High” as well as Texture and Water settings. We had to set everything else to “Medium” however. If you wanted to bump up to 1920x1200 with a 9800 GTX you’d have to further lower settings, like the all important Shaders Quality to “Medium.”

GeForce 9800 GTX SLI

When we moved up to GeForce 9800 GTX SLI we witnessed the greatest advantage to the gameplay experience in this evaluation. We were now easily able to play at 1920x1200 with 16X AF and have everything except Objects Quality at “High.” The experience was quite an improvement over the GeForce 9800 GTX. Alternatively, if you wanted to also have Objects Quality at “High” you would have to drop to 1600x1200, but then everything would be playable at “High.”

GeForce 9800 GTX 3-way SLI

When we moved up to GeForce 9800 GTX 3-way SLI we saw a further performance improvement, which did improve the gameplay experience. However, this performance scaling wasn’t as meaningful as what we saw moving from GeForce 9800 GTX to GeForce 9800 GTX SLI. With 3-way SLI we were able to continue to play at 1920x1200 with 16X AF and were able to set Objects Quality to “High” and increase Shadows, Physics, Volumetric Effects, Game Effects, Particles and Water to the highest image quality available at “Very High.” The game looks incredible at these settings. We were not able to play smoothly with AA enabled however.

GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI

GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI resulted in some interesting performance results in Crysis. We did not see Quad SLI scale well in Crysis, and as such we had some mixed results. We were able to run at 1920x1200 with 16X AF, same as SLI and 3-way SLI; however we had to lower Objects, Game Effects and Particles to “Medium.” But on the other hand we were able to have Physics, Volumetric Effects and Water on “Very High.” Overall, GeForce 9800 GTX 3-way SLI provided a better gaming experience in Crysis than GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI did. Remember, the GeForce 9800 GTX is clocked faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2; it has faster stream processors, ROPs and memory frequencies, which Crysis seems to love.

AA Performance with 3-way SLI

The GeForce 9800 GTX has 512MB of RAM on a 256-bit memory bus. When you have GeForce 9800 GTX SLI or 3-way SLI there is still only 512MB of RAM available. However, when you raise the resolution in a game, plus AA, you need a large framebuffer to support it. We found there to be a very large drop in performance just simply enabling 2X AA in Crysis with 3-way SLI. It wasn’t just slow in framerates, but it also felt very choppy and stuttered badly when 2X AA was enabled at 1920x1200.

In the graph below we are using the same in-game settings and simply enabling and disabling 2X AA in Crysis.

As you can see, without AA performance is very playable. Once we enable 2X AA though performance drops drastically, it was very painful to even complete this run-through. We have further evidence of this bottleneck in Assassin’s Creed on the next page.