NVIDIA's SLI: Part 2 - 6800U & 6800GT

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

Publisher: VU Games

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is a new game published by Vivendi Universal Games, and it is based around the film, The Chronicles Of Riddick, which was released on DVD not too long ago. It makes use of the OpenGL API and takes advantage of DirectX 9 capable video cards. The game has many intense 3D features that have already been seen in Doom 3, such as dynamic lighting, normal maps, advanced per-pixel shading, and realistic shadowing techniques.

Depending on what your video card is capable of, the game will auto detect what is the best Shader Mode for your system configuration. However, it defaults to Shader Model 2.0++ on all GeForce 6-series video cards. This mode runs very slow, and we recommend that you switch to the faster Shader Model 2.0 mode.

We controlled Anti-Aliasing from the driver control panel, while Anisotropic Filtering was controlled from inside the game. Thus, Anisotropic Filtering was left set to "Application Controlled" in the driver control panel.


Right now, there is no support for SLI in The Chronicles of Riddick. The first implementation of SLI support for this title in to Forceware 71.84 lead to instabilities with any SLI combination. Thus, NVIDIA have disabled SLI in this title, and you will receive no performance benefits from adding a second video card. However, you do not lose performance like you did in Forceware 71.84.

   < PROFILE Label="The Chronicles of Riddick">

      < APPLICATION Label="sbzengine.exe"/>

         < PROPERTY Label="multichip_rendering_mode" Value="4" Itemtype="predefined"/>

   < /PROFILE>

The 'multichip_rendering_mode' value of '4' means that SLI is disabled in this title. We tried to force SLI to work by changing the rendering mode to SFR, AFR and AFR2 mode, but had no success. We also tried to rename the application, while using an SLI mode, but that did not help our quest for more performance either. It looks like NVIDIA have locked the title down for the time being, while they work on getting an SLI profile to work.

We found that the Point of View GeForce 6800 Ultra was capable of a smooth frame rate at 1600x1200 with 2xAA 16xAF and the Shader Model 2.0 profile. We could not enable the Shader Model 2.0++ mode, which gives us High-Quality Soft Shadows, without a massive performance hit.

On the other hand, the XFX GeForce 6800 GT delivered a smooth gaming experience at 1600x1200 with 0xAA 16xAF along with the Shader Model 2.0 profile. There is a lot of texture aliasing in this title, which does not seem to go away with applying Anti-Aliasing. This meant that there was very little difference in image quality between the GeForce 6800 GT and GeForce 6800 Ultra.

The graph shows that there we no performance drop as a result of using SLI with Forceware version 71.89, unlike previous driver revisions - namely Forceware version 71.84. However, we also experienced no increase in performance either, because NVIDIA have disabled SLI in this title. That defeats the whole object of SLI.

Okay, the title has issues with SLI, or vice versa, so maybe we are a little harsh here. But the fact of the matter is that, currently, anyone who plays The Chronicles Of Riddick considerably more than any other title, may well find better ways to spend the cash that would go towards the second video card right now.

We hope that we will see an increase in SLI support in the very near future. One that will include popular titles, such as The Chronicles Of Riddick, and give adopters to the SLI platform the additional performance that they've paid for.