Results: 3DMark And Far Cry 3
Why is there a synthetic test and a real-world game on the same page? All of the cards I'm testing were on loan. Embarrassingly, all of the cards in today’s comparison were on loan, and I figured out that some of my data was missing after sending them back. I could have scrapped the piece altogether, but because some readers are probably only looking for comparisons between three-way GeForce GTX 760s and two-way 780s, I figured I'd simply march on with a couple of holes in-place.
If the scaling we see in 3DMark carries over to any of our real-world games, the cheaper cards could have trouble proving their value in three-way SLI.
Although I was missing results for two-way SLI on the 760s in 3DMark, it was the three-way numbers that I lacked for Far Cry 3. I'm keeping the charts anyway for the folks more interested in comparing a pair of GeForce GTX 760s to one 780.
Far Cry 3 suggests that two 760s is the way to go for around $600. This would have been a pretty definitive win if the GeForce GTX 780 were still a $650 card. Perhaps that's what Asus had in mind when it started designing its latest dual-GPU endeavor. That board's 2 GB per GPU would likely limit performance at very high resolutions and detail levels, but at least a pair of the GeForce GTX 760s on which Asus' solution is based would at least have sold for the same price as GeForce GTX 780.
