Performance in First Person 3D Shooters

The Chronicles of Riddick

The GeForce 6800-based card from MSI runs this game at an acceptable speed up to 1280x1024 resolution. It is not very fast against the cheaper GeForce 6600 GT, though. On the other hand, the MSI card works with NVIDIA’s perfected OpenGL driver and thus matches the performance of the more expensive ATI RADEON X800 XL.

The performance of the SLI platform with two MSI cards is impressive: the speed is high even in 1600x1200 and higher than that of the single GeForce 6800 GT as well as of the GeForce 6800 Ultra!

The rather average speed of the single GeForce 6800 and the impressive performance of the SLI configuration are due to the low clock rates of the GPU and memory on this card as well as due to the strong dependence of The Chronicles of Riddick on the GPU’s fill rate.

In the “eye candy” mode (i.e. when we enable such image-enhancing features as full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering) the single MSI NX6800-TD128E can hardly provide a playable frame rate even in 1024x768. Meanwhile, the SLI pair of such cards yields enough frames per second even in 1280x1024.

So, like in the “pure speed” mode, the GeForce 6800 is a little ahead of the GeForce 6600 GT but is much slower than the GeForce 6800 GT.