Multi-GPU World Tour 2006 Part 5: Most Played Titles - PAGE 1
Geordan Hankinson - Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

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-- Article Quick Nav -- 1 - Introduction2 - Test Setup3 - High End Platforms: 7900GTX vs X1900XT CrossFire4 - High End Platforms cont'd5 - Mid End Platforms: 7950GX2 vs X1900GT6 - Mid End Platforms 27 - Low End Platforms: 7600GS vs X1600PRO8 - Low End Platforms 29 - Conclusion

Introduction

Many weeks ago Neoseeker started work in a one of a kind collaborative effort with 8 other well known hardware sites to create a Mult-GPU series of articles that would span across 8 sites, cover over 60 benchmarks, and put 3 ATI CrossFire and 3 NVIDIA SLI systems under the microscope.  Last week the article series was launched and 4 articles have been published since.  This is now part 5 of the Multi-GPU World Tour and we'll be looking at the "Most Played Game Titles".

By this point if you've read the previous four articles from PenStarSystems, Bit-Tech, Bjorn3d, and HARDiNFO, you should have a fairly good impression of what we're looking to accomplish with this multi-site benchmarking article. As far as actual numbers go, we've seen a number of motherboard benchmarks from Bjorn3d, and on Wednesday HARDiNFO posted the first of the Multi-GPU video card setup results. HARDiNFO was responsible for covering the most frequently used benchmarks in hardware testing and their massively comprehensive coverage gives a good idea of the trends seen by many websites in their testing.

For those who are joining us without having read the previous 4 parts of this multi-site, multi-GPU article, I strongly encourage you to go back and check out those articles linked below which outline the hardware involved, the motherboards, and the initial slew of benchmark results.  This series is intended to read almost like multiple pages of a massive article, so please do check out the other installments to get the whole picture.  Here's an "index" of already published and upcoming articles:

• Introduction - PenstarSys - Live!
• GPUs - bit-tech - Live!
• Motherboards - Bjorn3D - Live!
• Common Benchmarks - HardInfo - Live!
• Xfire most played - Neoseeker - You've just read it! :)
• Uncommon Benchmarks 1 - NVNews - Live!
• Uncommon Benchmarks 2 - Rage3D - Live
• Uncommon Benchmarks 3 - Legit Reviews - Live
• The Verdict - Guru3D - Live

Our contribution has us looking at a rough cross section of a few of the most played multiplayer games on both XFire and Gamespy, though we do cover a couple more recent high profile titles such as Oblivion.  Not surprisingly, the titles at the top of XFire and Gamespy's list are not at the very bleeding edge of graphics - they require a certain amount of horsepower certainly, but these games are played by a wide range of users who have a variety of system capabilities.  This puts our particular tests in a less exciting light as far as sheer horsepower tests are concerned, but it does make these results highly relevant and representative of what a large gaming audience can expect from Multi-GPU setups.  Here's the rundown of titles we cover in this article:

Oblivion
Sin Episodes
Counter Strike Source
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Call of Duty
Battlefield 2
Guild Wars: Factions
World of Warcraft
Warcraft III

All of the Editors behind this article agreed that it would be best to go about the specifics of each test as saw fit. Because there are already hundreds of published benchmarks for the different cards being used in this testing, we at Neoseeker did not deem it important to feature standard settings across the three platforms.  As a result, each segment (low, mid and high end) feature varying differences in terms of resolution, filtering and detail options, that are tailored to that platform. The high and mid-end setups that we all agreed on are very close in terms of performance and as a result we decided on identical settings  across those two platforms because the results were so closely packed. Our low-end setups however were not capable of the high filtering and resolution combinations used in some instances so there is a marked difference in what we use in some of those cases.

Unfortunately, Battlefield 2, which is one of the games that we were tasked with benchmarking did not make it to the final cut of the article.  We ran into some problems with the game a third of the way through testing and were unable to rectify the situation in time for this article despite repeated re-installations and numerous other attempted tweaks. We will be sure to update our benchmarks once we sort out the issue.

Read on for a look at our hardware setup.

next: Test Setup »

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