Battlefield 2 SLI Performance: X8 vs X16 PCIe
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, since this is our first look at the new X16 nForce4 SLI chipset we will take the time to see how SLI performs on this board vs the older NF4 SLI chipset and if the differences that NVIDIA and their motherboard vendors are touting are true.
Battlefield 2 (Direct X)
Battlefield 2 is one of the first games to come along in quite a while that turned out to really push the current and even following generation gaming hardware. Having the privelege of being the first game that might need 2 GB of memory is either a positive or negative, depending on your viewpoint. Here are our IQ settings used:
Our map was the Strike At Karkand that turns out to be one of the most demanding in the retail package in terms of land layout, smoke and other shader effects.
At the 1600×1200 resolution we see no differences in performance at all between the old and new SLI chipsets. Running at the super high resolution of 2048×1536 we still don’t see any changes at 0xAA and 0xAF settings. But when we enable AA and AF we do see some magic begin to happen — its not much, but its something. The X16 chipset is about 7% faster on the average framerate and does offer higher max and min frame rates as well.
