Performance in Gaming Tests: First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2 was unstable on the new platform and wouldn’t launch altogether in SLI mode. The other games worked well, so the overall stability of the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe mainboard is quite high.

The Chronicles of Riddick

There’s almost no difference between the mainboards on the nForce4 SLI and nForce4 SLI X16 chipsets at low FSAA levels, although the newer mainboard used to be slower previously. It is now faster than the older one in the SLI AA 8x and SLI AA 16x modes, but by no more than 10%.

The new platform theoretically provides more comfort in 1280x1024 resolution in the SLI AA 8x mode, but you can hardly see the difference in practice.

Doom 3

It’s only in the SLI AA 8x mode and in 1600x1200 resolution that the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe is more than 1 fps faster than the older mainboard. The advantage is less than 5% and may be due to measurement errors rather than to any advantages of the new chipset. The mentioned mode is quite playable, but without any speed reserve, so you may have slowdowns in some of the most complex game scenes. To safeguard yourself against that, you can choose the less resource-consuming 4x FSAA mode.

A SLI configuration with two GeForce 7800 GTX 512 cards may make the SLI AA 8x mode playable with comfort in Doom 3 , but we can’t check this out until we get a second sample of this graphics card.