3-way SLI Action with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 and 3DMark Vantage

[malware]

A little joy for today, one week before the official announcement of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 cards. Here's a little sneak peak on what to expect from three NVIDIA GeForce GTX280 cards in tri-SLI configuration, an overclocked Intel QX9650 processor to 4GHz and the 3DMark Vantage Vista DX10 benchmark. Clock speeds of all three cards can be seen in the photo. The end result is 21350 marks.

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/08-06-12/3SLI_GTX280_m_thm.png (http://www.techpowerup.com/img/08-06-12/3SLI_GTX280_m.png)

Source: VR-Zone (http://www.vr-zone.com/articles/3-way_SLI_GTX_280_Scores_P21350_In_3DMark_Vantage/5866.html)

[MKmods]

That would be so perfect in my new SFF case:rockout:

(thanks again malware for all the good posts)

[Castiel]

HOLY HELL:eek:

But I would like to see it tested with a AMD Proc.

[Gallatin]

HOLY HELL:eek:

But I would like to see it tested with a AMD Proc.

i have to ask...... why? for the love of god why?

[MKmods]

HOLY HELL:eek:

But I would like to see it tested with a AMD Proc.

It would be nice to know if/how much of a difference it really makes.

[razaron]

@ gallatin : lol
this supposed gtx 280 benchmark is twice as good as the supposed 4850 CF benchmark

[a_ump]

that's not surprising, though those scores sound damn good since vantage is the newest and is supposed to be the benchmark for dx10 and they can already dominate it.though as always i'm sure vantage is no better a interpretation of how performance will be in games than 06 was.

[Castiel]

i have to ask...... why? for the love of god why?

Look at my avatar.
And I would also see how much of a difference it would be if you used a AMD chip.

[Weer]

This is nice but what I really want to see are two things:

1. Overclocking the Shader Core as far as it will go.
2. Playing Crysis - the only game I can't max out.

In honesty, these cards are worthless for today's games, because I doubt that any game in the next year will be as difficult to run as Crysis and so that is the only reason to buy them. My system can run any other game maxed out. And since I've already played Crysis.. twice, these cards are of no value to me for a long time. I'll be getting the ones that come after them.. that is if we are still able to discern which ones those will be, as nVidia keeps altering the names ridiculously.

[Megasty]

Tri-SLI is great & all but it is 2 grand later... That GPU score is insane as it should be :p

[MKmods]

when I read the thread It mentioned that quad didnt work as well as tri. Hopefully Nvidia will let the Gt versions do Tri SLI, that would be a great and a bit more cost effective.

[Squirrely]

Quite impressive.

Little overkill though, as most games can't use their full potential, unless you are using them at a ridiculous res. :laugh:

[eidairaman1]

more grains of salt, id rather see people here testing the cards, even wizzard so we know they arent touching any internal tweak settings.

[eidairaman1]

This is nice but what I really want to see are two things:

1. Overclocking the Shader Core as far as it will go.
2. Playing Crysis - the only game I can't max out.

In honesty, these cards are worthless for today's games, because I doubt that any game in the next year will be as difficult to run as Crysis and so that is the only reason to buy them. My system can run any other game maxed out. And since I've already played Crysis.. twice, these cards are of no value to me for a long time. I'll be getting the ones that come after them.. that is if we are still able to discern which ones those will be, as nVidia keeps altering the names ridiculously.

WHy should anyone require Crossfire/SLI to Play games, seriously, im pretty sure these driver modders can get more out of the cards than having to buy another card. BTW Crysis doesnt play well with any Multicard setup, even 1920x1200 it chokes.
Another Point Id rather be playing FPS at 60 on 1280x1024 than 30 FPS on 2***x16** 30 FPS is barely Playable, because you gotta account for dips in performance every so often.

[Edito]

Nice scores now lets wait and see in real games benchmarks to see how well it performs...

[yogurt_21]

seems pretty good.
oced tri sli 8800gtx for reference
http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.action?compareResultId=135662&compareResultType=19

oced tril sli 9800gtx
http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.action?compareResultId=109248&compareResultType=19

oced quad sli (dual 9800gx2)
http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.action?compareResultId=162493&compareResultType=19

[jbunch07]

impressive!
most impressive!

[HaZe303]

If 2 gx2 cards can get P23286, 21000+ isnt that impressive from tri sli of a 3 NEW gen cards?? It should be atleast 50% better if they want me to cough up 500euros for 1 card?? No way, im going with ATI cards this time. Im getting used to the lower priced cards as GT and GTS and 3870/4870 have. Nvidia will have a hard time selling me those super expencive cards in the future, atleast until there are mor PC exclusive games like Crysis. No most games on pc are ports of console games, those games are very well optimized and run sweet on pc´s with semi decent gfx cards, so a 4870 will do fine for me. And it will be cooler and draw less power as well!

[HTC]

There's something wrong with this score, IMHO!

Look in this (http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=62611) thread and notice the BIG jump when the 2nd GPU was enabled.

If this card (not SLIed) doesn't score @ least 10K in Vantage, it will be a disappointment and 3 of these ought to scale terribly well in Vantage, unlike 3D06, so i would expect it to score on the 23K-24K neighborhood, @ least.

[a_ump]

WHy should anyone require Crossfire/SLI to Play games, seriously, im pretty sure these driver modders can get more out of the cards than having to buy another card. BTW Crysis doesnt play well with any Multicard setup, even 1920x1200 it chokes.
Another Point Id rather be playing FPS at 60 on 1280x1024 than 30 FPS on 2***x16** 30 FPS is barely Playable, because you gotta account for dips in performance every so often.

yes, i would agree with you, were it another game. but one thing i've always noticed about crysis is even at the 20 FPS avg i play it at it seemed solid, which was weird as shit compared to css when if i get 20FPS its really really bad. i never noticed the lag in crysis until i got down to 15 or so, so yea i was laggin my lowest i ever hit was i thk 12FPS so put that card in my rig and even at 30FPS i dout i'd see the 15FPS where i notice lag. i don't know what crytek did but maybe its the coding that helps with the lag, cause i've never played a game where i would consider 20FPS stable or acceptable.

and its not just me check this site
http://forums.pureoverclock.com/showthread.php?p=14934#post14934

[panchoman]

the first thing that game to my mind besides the score was gpu-z in that picture! i must say, congrats w1zz, gpu-z has already become a standard tool for many overclockers, etc. and it continues to gain in popularity!

[freaksavior]

thats nice, but like everyone else is saying, i want real world benches i.e public benches with multiple system.

[panchoman]

now wheres the oct xfire that was promised to us by ati?

[imperialreign]

I wonder how much that OC had to do with the final score, though

QX9650 OCed to 4GHz, DDR3 OCed at 1GHz . . .

[HTC]

I wonder how much that OC had to do with the final score, though

QX9650 OCed to 4GHz, DDR3 OCed at 1GHz . . .

The CPU score was lower then the GPU score so, if anything, it held back the Vantage final result.

[DarkMatter]

yes, i would agree with you, were it another game. but one thing i've always noticed about crysis is even at the 20 FPS avg i play it at it seemed solid, which was weird as shit compared to css when if i get 20FPS its really really bad. i never noticed the lag in crysis until i got down to 15 or so, so yea i was laggin my lowest i ever hit was i thk 12FPS so put that card in my rig and even at 30FPS i dout i'd see the 15FPS where i notice lag. i don't know what crytek did but maybe its the coding that helps with the lag, cause i've never played a game where i would consider 20FPS stable or acceptable.

and its not just me check this site
http://forums.pureoverclock.com/showthread.php?p=14934#post14934

It's because of many things, but the most important is that everything in Crysis has a separate thread in CPU and memory: renderer, physics, AI, controls. And the engine will try to balance them acording to the situation. That means that unlike every other games (that I can think off at least) in Crysis "lag" in any of those systems doesn't affect the others. Usually graphics, physics or AI lag is traduced into mouse or net lag (extremely true for CSS), but this doen't happen in Crysis or is mitigated a lot which means almost the same in practice.

EDIT: That system is suposedly smart enough to change physics and AI "resolution" or "framerate" on the fly if it sees too many workload on the CPU and thinks it's not going to be able to handle it. What I mean with framerate and resolution there there is that, instead of calculating physics and AI for every frame it will do it at a lower speed than the renderer (framerate). Or it can calulate less interactions per frame (resolution). Anything to find the balance it needs.

[wolf]

it'd be nice to see the GT200b come out sooner rather than later for some much improved clock speeds and yeilds. apparently 60 out of 100 GT200 chips fails on the production line. and lets face it 602/1296 isnt that fast for the core.

i think what we need to see is a 55nm part with the full 256 (maybe more) shaders enabled, running at ~700/1750/2400

that alone should increase performance about 15% over GT200, not to mention the added OC headroom.

[Gallatin]

Look at my avatar.
And I would also see how much of a difference it would be if you used a AMD chip.
i did so what? my question still remains valid. maybe i rephrase. at current time a bench with inferior chip what good can be for 3-way sli except but bottleneck it?

p.s i have 2 amd chips and 2 intel chips from different job each one. i get whatever fit my needs. fanboyism does bad with my money.:toast:

[eidairaman1]

oy, bottleneck this bottleneck that, dude trust me bottlenecks are mythical.

[Wile E]

I wonder how much that OC had to do with the final score, though

QX9650 OCed to 4GHz, DDR3 OCed at 1GHz . . .

CPU doesn't make a huge difference in Vantage. I think 400Mhz on my quad netted me another 100pts, iirc.

[jbunch07]

CPU doesn't make a huge difference in Vantage. I think 400Mhz on my quad netted me another 100pts, iirc.

this is true.
vantage score has allot more to do with the GPU than the CPU.

[DarkMatter]

it'd be nice to see the GT200b come out sooner rather than later for some much improved clock speeds and yeilds. apparently 60 out of 100 GT200 chips fails on the production line. and lets face it 602/1296 isnt that fast for the core.

i think what we need to see is a 55nm part with the full 256 (maybe more) shaders enabled, running at ~700/1750/2400

that alone should increase performance about 15% over GT200, not to mention the added OC headroom.

I think GT200 is 10 clusters of 24 processors and not 15 clusters of 16, and that's what was needed for the card to have 256 processors. At least that's what it is according to leaked specs and a die shot floating around. Anyway we don't really know which specs are true and the possibility of being 16 SP clusters is interesting: could the card be 16 clusters of 16 processors, with one cluster dissabled for the sake of improving yields? Don't think so because yields are suposedly too low for a method like this to be in use. What do you guys think about this?

Hell, I love speculation. :D

[farlex85]

Very nice. That gpu score is roughly equal to the world record just set in vantage by 2 gx2's. So they got a 1 core advantage on very early drivers. Looks like it won't be until nehalem that a proc can give it its full power though, and the price for a system like that is just plain silly, so I really don't care what real game benchies are like. Who's gonna buy a system like that just to play Crysis? :confused: I'd like to see what Kingpin and Co. can do w/ this..........

[yogurt_21]

Very nice. That gpu score is roughly equal to the world record just set in vantage by 2 gx2's. So they got a 1 core advantage on very early drivers. Looks like it won't be until nehalem that a proc can give it its full power though, and the price for a system like that is just plain silly, so I really don't care what real game benchies are like. Who's gonna buy a system like that just to play Crysis? :confused: I'd like to see what Kingpin and Co. can do w/ this..........

it's more a than a 1 core advantage, the gtx280's are at stock while the 9800gx2's are severly oced., and being that the shader clock is so low on the gtx280, I imagine ocing it would have an increased gain percentage than normal. not to mention tri sli drivers for the gtx280 can't be optimized yet which means after a few months the same config could score in the 25k+ range.

[Rey17]

but like some people are saying that IS overkill no matter what game you have, these days games are not designed for 3 way sli.... but in time they will be !!

and 3 way sli just started some time ago, and we have to consider the drivers that come with it which would allow it to reach its full potential !!

so i was any one of you, no matter AMD OR INTEL, i would keep one graphics card now then later once they realease heaps of drivers, then go time !!

[wolf]

so if the tests are really gpu bound how does 3x9800GTX OC do? (TRi SLi)

and im thinking most 9800GTX's will do 775-800mhz core, 1900-2100 shader and 2350-2500 memory.....TRi SLi on that would be niiiiiice

[farlex85]

so if the tests are really gpu bound how does 2x9800GTX OC do?

About 13K-15K in the graphics portion if oc'd very well.

[magibeg]

but like some people are saying that IS overkill no matter what game you have, these days games are not designed for 3 way sli.... but in time they will be !!

and 3 way sli just started some time ago, and we have to consider the drivers that come with it which would allow it to reach its full potential !!

so i was any one of you, no matter AMD OR INTEL, i would keep one graphics card now then later once they realease heaps of drivers, then go time !!

Whats with you people and talking about overkill? Doesn't everyone remember when Doom 3 came out and stomped all the systems? And then after that Oblivion came out, followed by Crysis. Theres really no such thing as overkill when it comes to computer parts because the software will eventually catch up. Using a cannon to go hunting is overkill because the animals don't get any stronger. If you have the money buying up 3 high end videos is not overkill because the games will eventually bring the system to its knees anyway.