Performance in Gaming Tests: Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark05

The GeForce 7900 GTX SLI stops a mere 412 points short of the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire whereas the GeForce 7900 GTX is as many as 781 points behind the Radeon X1900 XTX. So, there’s no triumph for Nvidia in 3DMark05, but the company’s new solution cannot be considered as utterly defeated, either. Let’s better view the results of the separate tests.

In the first test the GeForce 7900 GTX is about 10-12% slower than the Radeon X1900 XTX using 4x FSAA. The two multi-GPU configurations, on ATI Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire and Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX SLI, have the same performance in this mode, hitting against the CPU-imposed speed ceiling.

The new SLI subsystem from Nvidia is slower than ATI’s CrossFire platform in the higher FSAA modes due to the differences in their memory controllers. The gap isn’t bigger than 5-10% in the 8x FSAA mode, though.