CPU Bottleneck / SLI Scaling revisited
Benchmarkextreme dives deep into the gray areas between hardware capabilities and gaming performance
Page 2 / 18 10/03/09
Crysis Single Player
No GPU performance analysis would be complete without Crysis. Crysis came out in November 2007, and to date it is the single most graphically intense GPU benchmark. Run this game at 2560 X 1600 at very high quality and AA enabled, and any graphics system would choke and cough and drop to its knees. My testing was done without AA so we could get some reasonable numbers. This is the CPU benchmark which comes with both the demo and full game.
Average FPS
We can see that a single card is not bothered at all by the CPU speeds. With dual SLI we gain significant FPS at 1680 X 1050 by overclocking to 3.25 GHZ. Tri SLI however shows what a CPU hog it can be right up to 4.2 GHZ at these resolutions.
Minimum FPS
We can see a similar sort of trend for the minimum FPS.
Average SLI Scaling
In an SLI scaling utopia, dual SLI would be 2.0 and TRI SLI 3.0. But usually, this is far from the case due to driver issues, graphics engine ad CPU overhead. From the above graphs, we can see how TRI SLI is let loose as the CPU is overclocked. The third card is yielding no benefit at all at the stock CPU speed but there are massive gains to be had once we tweak the CPU, especially at 1920 X 1200.
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