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When Vista arrived, Microsoft heavily promoted the benefits the new OS would bring gamers. Gaming was to be an important facet of the new operating system's design -- not added on as an afterthought. A shortcut to a 'Games' folder was added, by default, to Vista's start menu -- right beside music, pictures and documents. The  'Games for Windows' campaign and website was launched to promote Vista as a powerful gaming platform. DX10 was made exclusively for Vista -- forcing all gamers wanting to experience the new API to upgrade to new video cards, and embrace the new OS.

Unfortunately, 'Games for Windows' did not include support for CrossFire or SLI.

It's true.

When Vista was released back in January, most people expected multi-GPU support to be quickly forthcoming. In February, some reviewers thought it  "should be coming in a  couple of weeks"  (link). More recently, some others believed that the drivers should be done "by the end of April" (link). Countless performance reviews of games ran multi-GPU setups and wondered why running more than 1 GPU didn't affect performance much. Many heads were scratched.

But now, in the late summer of 2007, finally, better support for CrossFire and SLI in Vista has arrived.

Vista patch KB936710, re-released in that last week of August, flew pretty low underneath the radar -- most people weren't even aware of its arrival. But this patch, along with KB940105, are vital for any DX10 gamers hoping to get a performance boost with a second video card.

This article will look at how far Vista's support for CrossFire and SLI extends. We used five of the latest DX10 game benchmarks to measure the performance advantage a second 8800 GTS, 8800 GTX, or extra HD 2900 XT can deliver to hardcore PC gamers.  

Before we get to the benchmark, let's take a gander at our hardware setups.