X-bit labs

There Will Be Speed: The Clash of Modern Multi-GPU Technologies (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 03/24/2008 | 05:01 PM ]

Call of Juarez

The in-game benchmarking tools do not support 2560x1600 resolution. We have to limit our test to 1920x1200.

It’s a difficult situation. On one hand, the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 becomes the first single graphics card to allow playing Call of Juarez DX10 Enhancement Pack with the highest level of detail at least at 1280x1024. On the other hand, the specifics of the memory controller and/or inefficient memory management in the driver make Nvidia’s solutions, including the tandem of two GeForce 9800 GX2, fail at the higher resolutions.

ATI’s cards are free from that problem, and the CrossFireX subsystem feel all right at any resolution. The performance of the tandem of two Radeon HD 3870 X2 is especially impressive: the average frame rate of over 40fps at 1920x1200 is fantastic for such a resource-hungry application as Call of Juarez. The low minimum speed spoils the impression somewhat, but like in Battlefield 2142 it varies widely and doesn’t affect your playing comfort much.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Nvidia’s new GeForce 9800 GX2 shows superb scalability, being about two times as fast as the single GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB despite the somewhat lower frequency of the GPUs. With the addition of a second card, the 4-way SLI subsystem adds 40-50% more performance, which is an excellent result too, because the scalability of a homogeneous GPU solution worsens greatly as you add more GPUs into the system.

Alas, the lack of software optimizations means a lack of performance benefits for the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 and the 3-way/4-way CrossFireX systems.