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Published: July 1, 2006 | Source: Gainward | Author: Matt Kemp

Gainward Bliss 7900 GTX SLI

Quake 4

Quake 4 is a game built on the Doom 3 engine. This uses many DX 9.0c features and is a game that has not always ran so well on ATI hardware, being an OpenGL game. Once again I did three two minute runs on Quake 4 on each card and took the average of all my readings from these. I played a fast and furious part of the game that required both internal and external scenes.

Here are the settings that were found to be optimal for Quake 4 on a Dell 2405FPW display:

gwainward 7900gtx sli
And the FPS:
gwainward 7900gtx sli
I did try to run the SLI setup at 8 x AA. This was almost playable at this high resolution. I would suspect a bit of overclocking would make this playable. Once again the nVidia cards in SLI performed very well although Quake 4 sets 63FPS as its upper limit. Playing Quake 4 was an incredibly smooth experience and the card played most of the game as fast as it is possible.

Oblivion

Oblivion is an awesome RPG with a simply huge immersive environment, great graphics and incredibly realistic scenery. This game is currently one of the most testing games that you can buy and it is certainly a test of the high-end nVidia cards here. I chose to do a run-through of the Arena part of the game. I spoke to a character, did some magic whilst in a fight and fought in the arena that is pretty huge. Also as well as doing this test I took a wander around to make sure that the benchmark resembled the general gameplay with each card. This benchmark really tests todays cards and nVidia has not come out of this so well in previous reviews.

Here are the settings that were found to be optimal for Oblivion on a Dell 2405FPW display:

gainward 7900gtx sli
And the FPS whewn playing Oblivion:
gainward 7900Gtx sli
Here also are the in-game settings used. These are incredibly tweakable:
gainward 7900gtx sli

As you can clearly see the GTX SLI setup plays Oblivion at superior settings to all of the card setups that we have reviewed. The Game was also smoother and easier to play on the GTX SLI setup. I managed to put up the in-game details compared to the other card setups and this made the detail and enjoyment of playing Oblivion far superior on the SLI setup. Do note, however, that ATI cards can play Oblivion with AA enabled as well as HDR and as of yet nVidia have not managed to do this. However: the game looks stunning even without AA and to play at this resolution with AA would mean owning an X1900XTX crossfire setup.