Falcon Northwest FragBox SLI: Dare to Dream

Doom 3 v1.03

Doom 3 has been around for quite a while, but the engine is still impressive and there are several upcoming games that will use tweaked versions it. We continue to use the included Demo1 file for testing - imagine, a demo file that shipped with v1.0 of Doom 3 that still works after three version updates! While Doom 3 was an incredibly stressful game in terms of GPU requirements when it launched, the configurations we're testing today have become almost completely CPU limited without enabling 4xAA. We won't include the 0xAA results, but suffice it to say that frame rates were steady at 118-120 FPS all the way up to 2048x1536, which finally dropped performance of the 7900 GT system all the way to 115 FPS. If you don't feel 4xAA is necessary, you can pretty much set the game at the highest detail settings - even including Ultra quality - and spare no thought for graphics performance.





All of the tested systems perform about the same, whether they're equipped with two GT cards or two GTX cards. Even at the highest tested resolution, GTX SLI only holds an advantage of about 21% over GT SLI. Meanwhile, the advantage of GT SLI over a single GTX card ranges from 20% at the lower resolutions to almost 50% at 2048x1536. While Battlefield 2 didn't show a major advantage for GT SLI over a single GTX, Doom 3 clearly benefits from the additional memory bandwidth.

Quake 4, v1.2

Quake 4 uses the same engine as Doom 3, with one major difference: the latest official patch to Quake 4 adds multi-core CPU support. Call of Duty 2 is the only other PC game currently shipping with any form of SMP support, though our initial tests with the feature weren't particularly successful. The Q4 SMP support is now further along in development with the 1.2 patch, and there's a menu item that allows us to enable the feature. Unfortunately, our old demo file no longer works, so we recorded a new demo covering the same game sequence (basically, the first minute or two of gameplay after the introduction).

Amazingly, the demo files for Quake 4 are absolutely massive: our relatively short demo checks in at a whopping 140MB! In contrast, our two HL2 demo files combined are 5MB, and the 4 minute BF2 demo file and camera file are only 1.5MB. Needless to say, we don't plan on sharing our Q4 demo file - you're better off creating your own. Doom 3 also has relatively large demo files, though they compress a lot better; we're also happy to see that we can still use the original demo1 that's included with the initial shipping version of Doom 3.





Frame rates are substantially lower in Quake 4 than in Doom 3, but part of that can be chalked up to the fact that for testing with Ultra Quality mode in Quake 4. The higher resolution textures didn't seem to do much in Doom 3, but for whatever reason I can definitely see a difference in Quake 4. Starting with the GT graph, all of the systems are grouped together -- even the single GTX configuration falls in line with the GT SLI performance. It appears that the amount of texture swapping that occurs with 256MB graphics cards hinders performance, as the GTX SLI configuration is 65 to 100% faster.

Moving to the GTX performance, Ultra Quality once again demonstrates a game that can make use of more than 1GB of RAM, though the benefits seem to taper off as the bottleneck is moved back to the graphics card. SLI also offers a huge performance boost in Quake 4, as the single GTX in the SN26P is outperformed by 75 to 92%. The combination of dual core processor support with a typically GPU limited game definitely puts multiple GPU configurations in a good light. As for the FragBox, performance is once again basically equal to a similarly equipped desktop system.