Falcon Northwest FragBox SLI: Dare to Dream

Battlefield 2, v1.22

We've updated our BF2 benchmark (again), which means that old scores have been invalidated. It's really difficult to understand why a game patch necessitates new demo files, and ideally gaming companies will start to make demo file support backwards compatible if at all possible. If there's a good reason for the change, that's acceptable, but DICE has never been forthcoming about what "upgrades" have been made to the demo recoding/playback features.

We've tried to keep the demo file somewhat consistent, so we're still using the Operation Clean Sweep map with 16 players and a variety of camera angles including shots for infantry, planes, helicopters, tanks, etc. Other levels in Battlefield 2 are not quite as demanding on the system, but we wanted a large map with water to present something of a worst-case scenario. (Granted, getting a demo with 64 players would represent a better worst-case scenario, but creating such demos on our own is a bit difficult.) We didn't even bother running tests without 4xAA, as the game is almost entirely CPU limited on the top SLI configurations we're testing.





All of the platforms offer reasonable performance under Battlefield 2. Even the Shuttle system with a single GTX card manages to remain playable, and in fact it gives the 7900 GT SLI configurations a run for the money. Considering a single GTX card starts at $480 while two 7900 GT cards will run $580, not to mention the fact that you don't have to deal with SLI incompatibilities or headaches, and you can make a good point for going with a single fast GPU. That's something we'll keep an eye on throughout the rest of the game benchmarks, but of course the bottom line is that if you want maximum performance, the FragBox SLI system is about equal to the best full-ATX desktop systems.





Enabling audio causes quite a bit more load on the CPU, making Battlefield 2 largely GPUs limited. With dual GTX cards, the FragBox is about 17% slower than the DFI system -- this despite the fact that they both use the same Realtek ALC850 codec. Looking at the 7900 GT numbers, equipping the FragBox with an X-Fi card doesn't really help performance, though again we must say that it definitely sounds better. Something else to pay attention to is how much having only 1GB of RAM hurts performance in this configuration. It didn't seem to have much of an impact with the GTX cards, perhaps because they have 512MB of RAM each, but the 1GB GT SLI configuration is easily outperformed by a single GTX with 2GB of RAM.

We also tracked loading times for Battlefield 2, and though we don't have a graph made up, I can give you a couple quick numbers. The FragBox takes 100 to 140 seconds to load a level with sound when using to GT cards, the X-Fi, and 1GB of RAM. Upgrading to 2GB of RAM cuts the load times down to 50 to 80 seconds. That's the amount of time it takes to start a Battlefield 2 and load a level, but transitions between levels will also be substantially faster with 2GB of RAM.