Asus ARES: Is This The One Graphics Card To Rule Them All?

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Asus' new ARES immediately earns bragging rights as one of the fastest single graphics cards ever created. We put the beast through a gauntlet of tests to measure this product's true power. At the end of the day, we answer whether it's worth four digits.

Triple-Monitor Performance

We're using Far Cry 2 to demonstrate Eyefinity (ATI) and Surround 2D (Nvidia), both being marketing terms for triple-monitor setups:

Here we see the ARES leading the pack when it comes to driving three 1920x1080 monitors. Surprisingly, the GeForce GTX 480 cards in SLI seem to lose a great deal of traction at this triple-monitor resolution. It may be that the huge frame buffer of the ARES card is helping it out here. Note that the single GeForce GTX 480 card has no triple-monitor result; this feature is only available on GeForce cards when SLI is used.

We should also note that the GeForce cards require the beta 258.69 driver in order for triple-monitor gaming to work (as of this writing; Nvidia has since released a driver that enables it). We used this beta driver for the 5760x1080 resolution, but we used Nvidia's WHQL 257.21 drivers for all other benchmarks.

[EDIT] Further investigation shows that the GeForce GTX 480 SLI result should probably be much higher than 63 FPS at 5760x1080--in our Nvidia 3D Vision Surround: Is This The Future Of Gaming? article we achieved an average of 92.4 FPS using a pair of GeForce GTX 480s in SLI. We are looking into this discrepancy and will report our findings here when our investigation is complete. [/EDIT]  

Don Woligroski
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Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.