Performance in Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark06

The GeForce GTX 285 3-way SLI is not very good in 3DMark06. It can’t score even 20,000 points. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 scores 22,000 points while the Radeon HD 4890 3-way CrossFireX stops just a little short of that mark.

The individual tests produce more interesting results: ATI’s solutions seem to hit the performance ceiling imposed by the testbed’s CPU in the SM2.0 tests. The GeForce GTX 285 3-way SLI is about as fast as the GeForce GTX 285 SLI pair and is even inferior to the single GeForce GTX 295. In the SM3.0/HDR tests the graphics subsystems are ranked according to the number of GPUs, but we can see that Nvidia’s systems do not accelerate when they switch from two to three GPUs. With ATI’s platforms, adding a third GPU leads to a performance increase but adding a fourth GPU gives you nothing.