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Doom 3

As we've concluded in the past, SLI on Doom 3 with a 2.7 GHz Athlon 64 only begins to pay off starting at 1280x1024 with AA and AF -- anything less than that, and you're really just pussyfooting around with 10% increases. For a $500+ video card, 10% is just not worth it, unless you want to shell out for an FX-60. Even then, our framerates with the 2.7 GHz CPU are already so fast that even during heavy firefights will performance remain spectacular. If you're an avid Doom 3 gamer, stay away from the X1900 XT, as ATI's OpenGL performance still is not quite up to par with NVIDIA's. This was expected.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2's Video Stress Test demonstrates an extreme anomaly with the BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OCs in SLI. To be sure that it was not a flagrant Windows/configuration error, I cleaned all the chipset and display drivers out, reinstalled everything cleanly, and re-ran the benchmark numerous times. Each time, the scores were within 2% of each other. There simply seems to be a bug in the NVIDIA ForceWare 84.17 driver when it comes to SLI on the 7900 GTX running Half-Life 2. I'm willing to bet that it's simply an issue of a mis-entered/incomplete SLI profile for the hl2.exe application. I never witnessed such an anomaly with the 7800 GTX series, so I'm confident that this will be resolved in due time.

For now, all I can say is that enabling SLI for Half-Life 2 is a bad decision. The framerate drops are considerable, even though they remain playable.

Half-Life 2 has always been a strong-hold of the Red Team, but this time around, NVIDIA has caught up with the 7900 GTX, making them literally neck-and-neck with the X1900 XT. There is no victory for either team here, as they both pull in spectacular numbers.