VGA Charts VIII: PCI Express Winter 2005

Introduction

Playing current games such as Age of Empires III, Black & White 2, Serious Sam 2 and F.E.A.R. with all the eye-candy turned on requires a GeForce 6800, GeForce 7 or Radeon X1800 card. Anything less than that can mean turning off real-time lighting or shadow effects for performance reasons. Certainly, the most important new features of the newest generation of graphics chips are PixelShader 3.0 and HDR rendering, which make water look even more realistic or can produce literally brilliant lighting effects.

NVIDIA's SLI offering is targeted toward the extreme high end. Here, two graphics cards are connected and work in tandem, improving performance by up to 73%. However, performance can also take a hit if a particular game is not optimized for SLI. In this article, four SLI solutions compete with their single-card counterparts and the rest of the field in seven gaming benchmarks.