NVIDIA's SLI: Part 3 - 6800 & 6600 GT

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.

As we mentioned yesterday, The Chronicles Of Riddick does not support SLI at the moment, meaning that there is no performance benefit from adding a second video card in to the fold for SLI.

The BFGTech 6600 GT OC in both single card and SLI mode was best-playable at 1024x768 with 2xAA 16xAF using the Shader Model 2.0 shader profile. The GeForce 6600 GT OC was not fast enough to deliver a smooth gaming experience at 1280x1024 0xAA 16xAF, as we feel that this title benefits from an increase in resolution more than applying Anti-Aliasing to a lower resolution.

On the other hand, the MSI GeForce 6800 Std was fast enough to deliver a smooth gaming experience at 1280x1024 0xAA 16xAF using the Shader Model 2.0 profile, while the XFX GeForce 6800 GT was capable of a smooth frame rate at 1600x1200 0xAA 16xAF with the Shader 2.0 profile, much like we experienced yesterday with a faster processor.

Again, it is worth noting that the minimum frame rate on a single GeForce 6800 GT did not drop when using a slower CPU, while the average frame rate dropped by all of 0.2 frames per second - hardly worth worrying about.

As we mentioned yesterday, it is a disappointment not to see this title supporting SLI, as the slower video cards would really benefit from the performance boost created by adding a second video card in to the fold. If this title is your darling, you are much better spending more money on a fast single card solution than on an SLI solution right now, as you will see no performance benefits from adding the second video card.