X-bit labs

Two for One: Nvidia's Dual-Chip GeForce 7950 GX2 Reviewed (page 17)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 06/09/2006 | 06:01 PM ]

F.E.A.R.

The 96 pixel processors put the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire in the lead in 1024x768, but in higher resolutions it is for some reason slower than Nvidia’s GeForce 7900 GTX SLI and GeForce 7950 GX2. The latter two go neck and neck up to 1600x1200 resolution where the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI wins by 10% due to its higher memory frequency.

In other words, we’ve got a situation similar to what we saw in Far Cry . The efficient new ForceWare driver must be the reason for the high performance of the GeForce 7950 GX2 which has rather modest technical characteristics.

As soon as we turn on 8x FSAA, the GeForce 7950 GX2 falls behind the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI in all the resolutions, but by no more than 5%. The new card’s min speed in 1280x1024 is considerably lower than that of the fastest dual-card SLI config.

The Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire also comes up among the leaders here – it had been slower than Nvidia’s solutions in the previous test.

The more difficult antialiasing modes are too hard for today’s multi-GPU solutions in this game. Note, however, that the GeForce 7950 GX2 is obviously slower than the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI or Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire here.