Date:
Monday , October 20, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Crysis Warhead and Stalker CS - Multi-GPU Gameplay

Want to know how AMD’s CrossFire and NVIDIA’s SLI perform in Crysis: Warhead and Stalker: Clear Sky in DX10 at HD resolutions? We put new-gen CrossFire and SLI head-to-head in six setup configurations to show you what they can deliver.

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System Test Setup

We will be using both an EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and an ASUS P5E3-Premium CrossFire motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3. The 790i motherboard of course supports NVIDIA’s SLI while the Intel X48 chipset motherboard from ASUS supports ATI CrossFire dual card configurations. While it might be a bit “overkill,” we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Comparison Setup

As always, we are using the latest drivers. For the NVIDIA GPU based video cards we are using 178.24 WHQL. For the AMD GPU based video cards we are using Catalyst 8.10 WHQL.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit installed.

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in bar graph form with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.