NVIDIA Linux SLI (1.0-8174)

With our previous article that we published moments ago, demonstrating the performance of the GeForce 7800GTX 256MB under Linux with the 1.0-8174 Rel80 drivers that were finally released today, there’s no disputing that the Windows XP NVIDIA ForceWare users can generally see a significantly higher frame-rate with the same hardware components, in addition to other features that aren’t yet supported by the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers. However, how do NVIDIA’s initial Rel80 Linux drivers (1.0-8174) fair in the world of Scalable Link Interface? Today we will be investigating all of these areas of SLI as we measure the level of performance on this Athlon 64 system with Enemy Territory v2.60, Quake 4 v1.0.5, and Doom 3 v1.3.1302. To start with, below is the system setup used during the testing for this article. The basis for this system is Tyan’s K8E-SLI, which we recently reviewed here, and it has proved to be an exceptional desktop and workstation motherboard and is based off of the nForce Professional 2200 Chipset rather than the nForce4 SLI.