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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI

We take a close look at gameplay performance with the GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI and compare it to Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX. The results may surprise you and make you question whether Quad SLI or CrossFireX are worth investing in for gaming at this time. You will want to see what happened with GTA4.

Call of Duty: World at War

Call of Duty: World at War is the successor to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare which we had used for quite a while here do to its popularity. Call of Duty: World at War is based on the same game engine as CoD 4, but has tweaked up the graphics slightly. We have chosen to do perform our manual run-through in the mission: “Their Land, Their Blood.” This level provides a bright outdoor scene with plenty of particles, explosions, fire propagation, and a lot of vegetation. There is a new patch out for the game, and we are using it, v1.2.

Highest Playable Settings

Call of Duty: World at War isn’t that hard on video cards until you enable the special antialiasing features to reduce aliasing on alpha textures. In this case that is NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling AA and AMD’s Quality Adaptive AA. We have found that this game has a lot of outdoor action and scenes that take place and there is a lot of vegetation in this game. By enabling these transparency AA modes we can greatly improve the gameplay experience and make this game look very nice at 2560x1600.

We found that both Quad SLI and 4870 X2 CrossFireX are very even in terms of gameplay experience at 2560x1600. We were able to enable 4X TR SSAA on GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI at 2560x1600 and maintain very high levels of performance. You will see we only hit a minimum of a high 54FPS! Our average is near 90FPS. Now, it may seem like we could go higher, and we did try. We tried to enable higher AA levels by using “Enhanced AA” in the NV control panel. Unfortunately, doing so meant gameplay was not playable with TR SSAA enabled. Now, if you wanted to disable TR SSAA you could then run at 8X or 16X CSAA in this game. However, the improvement from 4X to 8X or 16X AA is not noticeable at 1600x1200. What is more noticeable is turning on TR SSAA. Therefore 4X TR SSAA is the best balance of image quality and performance, this looks better to us than 16X AA with no TR SSAA enabled.

The AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX also performed great and allowed 4X Quality ADAA at 2560x1600. We tried to enable the higher levels by using “Edge Detect” AA but 12X CFAA was NOT playable, even with Quality ADAA off! 4X Quality ADAA was the best balance of gameplay performance and IQ.

The single GeForce GTX 295 was playable at 2X TR SSAA at 2560x1600. Therefore by adding another GTX 295 and enabling Quad SLI the advantage was going from 2X TR SSAA to 4X TR SSAA, not a huge advantage overall in terms of gameplay experience. The performance advantage is big, but it doesn’t buy you a whole lot in this game.