The chaps over at Firing Squad have gathered together the latest $300+ high-end cards from ATI and NVIDIA, as well as a few high-end cards from yesteryear such as the GeForce 7800 GTX and Radeon X1800 XT 512MB. Other topics discussed include 256MB vs 512MB benchmarks, and single-card as well as dual-card configs. Do two GeForce 6800 GS cards add up to one 7900 GT?

Looking over the baseline 4xAA/16xAF numbers, the GeForce 7950 GX2 comes out on top in terms of single-card performance, although its margin of victory isn't as great as you'd expect, particularly at higher resolutions. We believe this is because SLI currently isn't as scaling as well as it normally does in BF2142, but more on this later. It's a tight race between the GeForce 7900 GTX and the Radeon X1950 XTX, but ultimately the XTX board comes out ahead, particularly as you increase the screen resolution. The 7900 GTX and X1950 XTX go from a tie at 1280x1024 to the X1950 XTX taking a 9% lead by 2048x1536. Meanwhile, the 7900 GTX and Radeon X1900 XTX are locked in a virtual tie across the board. The GeForce 7900 GT isn't able to keep up with the other high-end cards, we were honestly a little surprised to see it falling so far behind the 7900 GTX so we went back and re-ran our results but came to similar findings. If it weren't for the 256MB vs 512MB benchmarks on page 3 we'd chalk it up as a frame buffer i.e. memory size issue, but that doesn't appear to be the case. We honestly just don't know why the GT falls so far behind the GTX, it's probably a combination of the 200MHz clock speed deficiency, mixed with the slower memory speed (140MHz slower) and its smaller frame buffer. We also noted that the GeForce 6800 GS delivers roughly half the performance of a GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB.

When it comes to SLI versus CrossFire, CrossFire currently comes out ahead in Battlefield 2142 performance. Based on our tests, we have a strong feeling part of the reason why CrossFire put up such a strong showing in these tests in particular is because CrossFire was scaling a little better than SLI was in the Battlefield 2142 beta. In previous dual-GPU testing, we've found that enabling CrossFire and SLI typically yields just shy of a doubling in performance - it's usually a performance increase of 1.7x-1.9x, but not quite 2x. We included GeForce 7900 GT baseline scores so you could see that NVIDIA's SLI isn't delivering anywhere close to these ratios, particularly as you increase the screen resolution. By the time we hit 2048x1536, the performance increase from going from one 7900 GT card to two boards running in SLI was just 22%, that's a long way from a doubling in performance! Keep in mind, as we mentioned in the intro, we had to force AFR mode to get SLI to scale at all with Battlefield 2142 beta, so its quite possible that the AFR mode we selected isn't quite ideal for BF2142 and more driver work will be needed on NVIDIA's part to get SLI to scale more appropriately. That's what it looks like to us at least (it would also explain the lower than expected performance of GeForce 7950 GX2 at higher resolutions). We also see the X1950 XTX begin to pull away from the X1900 XTX a little more than in single-card config thanks to its GDD4 memory.