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GeForce 9600 GT SLI Performance February 22, 2008 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Yesterday we saw an OC'ed GeForce 9600 GT take down the 8800 GT in many benchmarks, so what happens when you combine two cards for SLI? Is this SLI combo more potent than the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra? What about the Radeon HD 3870 X2? Find out in this article!
 GeForce 9600 GT SLI Performance | Page:: ( 1 / 11 ) |
A quick recap
Yesterday we took a look at NVIDIA’s newest mainstream offering, the 512MB GeForce 9600 GT. At the heart of the GeForce 9600 GT is NVIDIA’s G94 GPU. G94 is built on TSMC’s 65-nm manufacturing process and contains 64 stream processors – a little over half the amount of shaders found in the GeForce 8800 GT. Despite the reduced number of stream processors, the 9600 GT is surprisingly fast, this is due in large part thanks to its high clock speeds of 650MHz core/1625MHz for the stream processors. G94 also incorporates the same architecture tweaks found previously in the GeForce 8800 GT. This includes additional texture address units as well as compression improvements.
In the article we found that the GeForce 9600 GT delivered an impressive performance improvement over its direct predecessor, the GeForce 8600 GT/GTS. We ran a mixture of DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 benchmarks, and concluded that the 9600 GT ran 2X faster than the 8600 GTS in DX9 testing, and up to 2.5X faster in DX10. In comparison to its direct competitor, the Radeon HD 3850, the GeForce 9600 GT continued to fare well. The 9600 GT outperformed the 3850 in all of our DirectX 10 tests, and ran faster than the 3850 in DX9 games like Call of Duty 4, F.E.A.R., and Company of Heroes. In some of these cases by nearly 30%. Only in Lost Planet and Oblivion did the 3850 prevail over the GeForce 9600 GT.
Now we’re here today to see how the 9600 GT performs when two cards are combined together for SLI. With prices starting as low as $179.99 at online retailers like Newegg and Zipzoomfly, two GeForce 9600 GT cards could conceivably be run in SLI for less than the price of one GeForce 8800 GTX or Radeon HD 3870 X2 – but is the 9600 GT SLI combo faster than either of these solutions? That’s what we plan to find out.
We’re also going to include the GeForce 8800 Ultra and GeForce 8800 GT SLI combination. While the 8800 Ultra is currently listed at over $600 on Pricegrabber, it is NVIDIA’s fastest card and we’re curious to see how it compares to the others; the 8800 GT SLI combo is included because the 8800 GT is a highly popular upgrade right now and we’re sure that many of you would be curious to see how it fares against the 9600 GT SLI configuration. Finally, we also threw in the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and Sapphire’s Radeon HD 3870 Atomic. In the conclusion of the 9600 GT performance preview article we suggested that AMD needs to counter the factory OC’ed 9600 GT cards from NVIDIA’s board partners with a wave of factory OC’ed 3870s of their own, so we were curious to see how that potential battle would play out in the benchmarks.
Since we don’t have two identical 9600 GT reference boards to test SLI, we’re combining the ASUS EN9600 GT with EVGA’s e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC. To keep things equal, we of course ensured that the final SLI combo was running at the stock 9600 GT speeds.
| System Setup | Page:: ( 2 / 11 ) |
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750
EVGA nForce 780i SLI motherboard
4GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic
Catalyst 8.2
GeForce 8800 GTX
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
GeForce 8800 Ultra
ForceWare 169.28
ASUS EN9600 GT
EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT Superclocked
ForceWare 174.12
300GB Western Digital Caviar SE
Windows Vista 64-bit w/Service Pack 1
Benchmarks
Company of Heroes 1.71
F.E.A.R. 1.08
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Call of Duty 4
Half-Life 2 Episode Two
Lost Planet
Crysis 1.1
| F.E.A.R. Performance | Page:: ( 3 / 11 ) |
| F.E.A.R. Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 46 | 210 |
| GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 59 | 290 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 35 | 144 |
| Radeon HD 3870 X2 | 47 | 221 |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 51 | 239 |
| GeForce 8800 GT SLI | 64 | 338 |
| EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC | 38 | 161 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic | 21 | 123 |
| GeForce 8800 GT 512MB | 36 | 167 |
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| Company Of Heroes DX10 | Page:: ( 4 / 11 ) |
| Company of Heroes Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 12.9 | 106 |
| GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 17.5 | 151 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 12.6 | 81.7 |
| Radeon HD 3870 X2 | 14.9 | 97.5 |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 16 | 119.5 |
| GeForce 8800 GT SLI | 20.1 | 162.4 |
| EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 14 | 93.5 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic | 9.4 | 63.8 |
| GeForce 8800 GT 512MB | 15.7 | 97 |
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| Oblivion | Page:: ( 5 / 11 ) |
| Oblivion Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 38 | 56 |
| GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 54 | 66 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 28 | 40 |
| Radeon HD 3870 X2 | 60 | 70 |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 42 | 60 |
| GeForce 8800 GT SLI | 60 | 72 |
| EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 32 | 47 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic | 31 | 44 |
| GeForce 8800 GT 512MB | 36 | 49 |
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| HL2 Episode 2 | Page:: ( 6 / 11 ) |
| Lost Planet DX10 | Page:: ( 7 / 11 ) |
| Call Of Duty 4 | Page:: ( 8 / 11 ) |
| Call of Duty 4 Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 32 | 100 |
| GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 40 | 121 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 23 | 81 |
| Radeon HD 3870 X2 | 39 | 108 |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 35 | 97 |
| GeForce 8800 GT SLI | 40 | 139 |
| EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 27 | 90 |
| Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic | 23 | 81 |
| GeForce 8800 GT 512MB | 26 | 88 |
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| Crysis DX10 High | Page:: ( 9 / 11 ) |
Crysis High – Direct3D
| Crysis Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| ASUS GeForce 9600 GT | 17 | 24 |
| GeForce 8800 GT 512MB | 20 | 26 |
| GeForce 8600 GTS | 5 | 8 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB | 6 | 18 |
| HIS Radeon HD 3850 TurboX | 17 | 24 |
| GeForce 8800 GT 256MB | 3 | 5 |
| EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT Superclocked | 19 | 26 |
| BFG GeForce 9600 GT OC | 17 | 24 |
| Palit GeForce 9600 GT Sonic | 18 | 25 |
| Radeon HD 3870 | 18 | 27 |
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| BioShock DX9 | Page:: ( 10 / 11 ) |
| BioShock Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 40 | 90 |
| GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 42 | 98 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 27 | 68 |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 45 | 110 |
| GeForce 8800 GT SLI | 56 | 115 |
| EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 32 | 74 |
| GeForce 8800 GT 512MB | 33 | 77 |
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| Conclusion | Page:: ( 11 / 11 ) |
Never before have we seen a mainstream GeForce card put together this kind of showing with SLI, it really is a remarkable achievement to see a pair of sub-$200 cards outrun a card that costs twice as much. Previously we were lucky to see two cards of this class run even with a $400 board: 3.5 years ago, two GeForce 6600 GTs were just a hair slower than one GeForce 6800 GT.
Now some would argue that this is due in part because there’s been so little innovation on the high-end of the graphics segment lately. This argument is definitely true. The GeForce 8800 GTX is over one year old now, and the 8800 Ultra is merely a higher clocked version of the GTX. So these cards have remained at the top of the market basically unchallenged for quite some time now. In fact, we really haven’t seen the high-end segment of the graphics market this stagnant since the days of the 3dfx Voodoo 2!
On the other hand, it is refreshing to see that innovation in the mainstream segment continues to advance. After all, there aren’t many people who can afford to spend $400 on a new graphics card every 12 months.
With the debut of the GeForce 9600 GT, expect the GeForce 8800 GT and 8800 GS to slowly disappear. With its higher clock speeds and larger frame buffer, the 9600 GT is generally faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB anyway, so we doubt this GPU will be missed by many. Going forward we would like to see NVIDIA produce a more affordable G94 card with slower clocks (GeForce 9600 GS perhaps?), but for the time being the GeForce 8600 GTS will occupy the slot below the 9600 GT in NVIDIA’s lineup. The GeForce 8800 GT 512MB will remain a viable alternative to the 9600 GT at the $230+ price point.
In any case, NVIDIA’s truly got a winner with the GeForce 9600 GT. Whether you plan on purchasing one card or two, this GPU redefines what you typically expect out of a mainstream graphics card. Especially once the 9600 GT is overclocked!