Asus RoG Mars Quad SLI Review

Performance Analysis

We began testing with Fallout 3. Sadly for Asus though, Nvidia’s drivers aren’t up to snuff in many titles and Fallout 3 is one of them. Our benchmark begins by blowing up a couple of vehicles, which causes two graphically demanding explosions that ground even this Goliath of a graphics card to a standstill when we used AA.

With no AA, the card was able to churn our smooth and playable frame rates even at stupendously high resolutions. Add some AA to the mix, and we saw noticeably stutters as the card tried to apply AA while rendering explosions. This wasn't a one-time glitch either - testing whether the drop in frame rate was a bug we could blow up as many cars as we could find and the card would still stall. Even re-loading the level didn't help the problem, so we can only surmise that the Nvidia driver team needs to take another look at AA in Fallout 3

Playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky was a more pleasant task. This is a resource-hungry game, so we were expecting the Mars to produce frame rates the likes of which we'd only dreamed of. That simply wasn't the case, however, with mediocre frame rates from the Mars compared to standard high-end graphics cards. While the Mars ran the game smoothly at 2,560 x 1,600 (the native resolution of a 30in TFT) so can a sub-£300 ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. Even the inferior GPUs of the £335 Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 can just about manage that resolution.

Dawn of War II was another tragedy for the Mars. The frame rates were consistently lower than when we used a single GTX 285. We now know that this card is epic at Dawn of War II from Harry's What's the Fastest Graphics Card article, and at a third of the price of the Mars, it's great value for any DoW II fans with 24in or 30in screens.


The Mars fared similarly poorly to the GTX 285 in Call of Duty: World at War, where the simplicity of a single, fast GPU saw faster frame rates than for the Mars. These two wins for the GTX 285 (CoD5 and DoW II) might seem odd at first, as the Mars has two stock-speed GTX 285 GPUs, so you'd think that it'd be at least as fast as a single GTX 285. However, as the SLI driver is trying to force the game to render across both the GPUs of the Mars, there's arbitration overhead to slow things down, even if that arbitration is as simple as checking whether each frame can be rendering across both GPUs simultaneously, and then sending the entire frame to GPU 0.

Crysis has never scaled well in multi-GPU systems, but the game just couldn't ignore the raw processing power of the Mars. At 2,560 x 1,600 the Mars reigns supreme. You could argue that the lead is only a few fps, but it's the crucial few fps that makes the game run at a reliably smooth 25fps rather than a slightly jittery 21fps or 22fps. Granted, you're paying a huge premium for those fps, but at least there's some good news for Asus when it comes to Crysis.

While we can place a lot of the blame for the ropey fps levels of the Mars at Nvidia's door - the average frame rates were very high, and the Mars was spectacular at not dropping many fps as we upped the resolution and AA setting - we can only blame Asus for the noise of the card. While managing to stuff two GTX 285 into a single dual-slot graphics is a great technical achievement, the Mars is incredibly loud - not only does is cost as much as a Concorde, it also sounds like one when fired up.

Conclusion

When Bugatti made the Veyron, the fastest road card in the world, it didn’t have to worry about performance being crippled by shoddy petrol. However, Asus, having made the fastest graphics card on earth, does have to worry about shoddy drivers, and it’s precisely that which has let down the Republic of Gamers Mars graphics card. If it had been the fastest card ever, perhaps it might have come somewhere close to justifying the £1,000 price tag as it's a special item and something you can't get from anyone else.

While a single Mars performed well in S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky and Crysis, the other games didn't like the Mars nearly as much. Dawn of War II and Call of Duty: World at War both ran slower on the Mars than on the significantly cheaper (and single-GPU, we might add) GeForce GTX 285, while the Mars didn't know what to do with the AA of Fallout 3. And don't even think about buying two of these cards and running them in SLI, unless you're just after epic folding scores. If you have just spent two grand on a pair of these cards, you’ll be devastated by the erratic and often slow performance you're seeing.

While Asus deserves kudos for conquering the engineering challenges of putting two hot GTX 285 GPUs into one card, the Mars is not worth this sort of money by any stretch of the imagination.

Update

By popular demand, we've taken the Mars apart to see what's inside that massive cooler. And we even managed to put it all back together again with no spare screws!

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• 4/10

Score Guide