Serious Sam 2

This test is so difficult that the SLI pair of two GeForce 7800 GTX only yields a frame rate of about 50fps in the 4x FSAA + 16x AF mode. At higher levels of antialiasing, the performance immediately plummets below comfortable.

There is no difference between the nForce4 SLI and the nForce4 SLI X16 platforms, although Serious Sam 2 cannot be counted among games with low textural load. Shaders using 4 textures are everywhere in this game; shaders with 7 or even 8 textures occur, too. That’s why we think it rather strange the increased number of PCI Express lanes for each graphics card on a multi-GPU platform has no effect on the performance.

It is possible, however, that the system performance is limited by the texture-processing speed of the GPU, considering the relatively low frequency of the GeForce 7800 GTX, which is 430MHz. The rather slow graphics memory of the card may affect the results, too.

Unreal Tournament 2004

To our surprise, Unreal Tournament 2004 proved to be among those games that profit by having more PCI Express lanes on the graphics card slots. There’s no performance gain in the 4x FSAA and 8x SLI AA modes, but then it is 10% to 30% in the 16x SLI AA mode! The resolution of 1600x1200 is playable with comfort in the latter mode. This is a great improvement over the previous test session when the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe was slower than the older mainboard due to the reduced HyperTransport bandwidth between the chipset’s Bridges.