Performance in Strategies

Age of Empires 3

The GeForce 7800 GTX SLI increases its lead over the RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire as the resolution grows. The gap varies from 18-20% in 1024x768 to 60% in 1600x1200 resolution.

The GeForce 7800 GTX SLI wins this test at 8x FSAA, too, notwithstanding the slower memory. This time only 1024x768 resolution is playable.

Even though the 16x SLI AA algorithm takes up a lot of the graphics subsystem resources, the SLI pair of GeForce 7800 GTX cards holds the first place. The RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire follows the leader closely, though.

Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

The shadows rendering acceleration technology helps the GeForce 7800 GTX SLI outperform the RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire in two resolutions out of three. This time around all the top-end graphics cards and multi-GPU systems deliver a playable frame rate in all the tested resolutions.

The two multi-GPU platforms match one another’s performance when doing 8x Super AA and 8x SLI AA, with minor advantage to either side in a particular resolution. Here, 1600x1200 resolution is hardly available for the gamer. Note also the much higher minimal fps rate of the SLI platform.

You can play this game with comfort in 1024x768 resolution on both RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire and GeForce 7800 GTX SLI platforms, but the speed will bottom out less on the latter platform in the most complex scenes. In higher resolutions the ATI platform breaks away because the competitor uses a more difficult FSAA algorithm, but it hardly matters for a practical gamer: 30-35fps is rather too slow for such a dynamic strategy as Dawn of War .