Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 SLI

These tests were completed using the following hardware: Core i7 920, MSI Eclipse SLI motherboard, 2x Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB in SLI, 3x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1,066 at 6-5-5-15-1T, Seagate 7200.10 250GB SATA HDD.

Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game.

For our testing, we set all the settings to High. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1,680 x 1,050 for the time being. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.


Although there were no performance differences with a single card installed, there are some small gains with Nvidia SLI - we witnessed an increase of around one percent (yeah, when we say small, we mean it, boyo) with two GeForce GTX 280s. At higher resolutions, there may be bigger performance gains - that's something we'll be looking at once Service Pack 2 is final.

Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft and it's one of the most hotly-anticipated games of this year. While it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, Far Cry 2 is built on its own in-house engine and has no association to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now.

The game uses DirectX 10.1 to improve anti-aliasing performance and quality. The improvements are made by reading the multisampled depth buffer in a single pass - something that was only introduced officially with DirectX 10.1. However, Ubisoft has also made the enhancements available to Nvidia hardware as well through a DirectX 10 extension.

We used a retail version of the game and the in-built gameplay demo set to Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.


However, in Far Cry 2, the performance swung the other way - Service Pack 1 was faster here by a single percent.