X-bit labs

Dressed to Kill: ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Mainboard Review (page 17)

Category: Mainboards

by Alexey Stepin

[ 12/28/2005 | 12:08 PM ]

Unreal Tournament 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004 is the first game where the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe is considerably slower than the older mainboard. The difference is most notable at 8x FSAA where it amounts to almost 10%. This is not such a big deal, but it shows that the nForce4 SLI X16 concept is not perfect. The reduced bandwidth of the CPU-chipset thoroughfare negates the potential benefits from the two full-fledged PCI Express x16 slots. This doesn’t show up much in games, but in CPU-intensive tasks, for example data compression, the new chipset may be much slower than the older one. The big gap between the nForce4 SLI and nForce 4 SLI X16 in Unreal Tournament 2004 is probably due to the fact that the game doesn’t use pixel shaders and puts but a small load on the graphics processor, so the performance of the graphics subsystem is not a performance-limiting factor here.

The ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe is slower than the A8N-SLI Premium in all resolutions on the Metallurgy map, too. Being not a very difficult game, Unreal Tournament 2004 allows using 16x FSAA on a SLI-compatible graphics subsystem consisting of two GeForce 7800 GTX cards.