Nvidia's Three-Way SLI Test Shuttle Can Run Crysis at Full Speed

Experience has it that the more hardware you stuff inside your computer, the better it runs. Nvidia surely must have thought the same when it released the three-way SLI link for its high-end graphics cards. Two video cards are better than one, but three of them is perfection.

The video industry is under permanent siege with the advent of the newer titles in the gaming world. For instance, the ultimate hysteria in the branch is Crysis, the game that can (and will) paralyze everything has a CPU and a video card. In order to be run at full resolution and detail quality, the game needs to run on a rocket-like computer. There have been numerous reports that said a normal, two-way SLI link is not enough for full quality, even though the SLI was made between high-end graphics cards.

Nvidia could not miss the opportunity of showcasing its three-way SLI technology back at the Consumer Electronics Show, especially since rival AMD/ATI came with the R680 big guns. Although packing three video cards into a single computer might seem a waste of resources, sometimes it is the ultimate solution to fight the gaming software resource hogs. Nvidia managed to run the "infamous" Crysis on a custom Q6600 quad core system with three 8800 GTX graphics cards running at maximum resolution (1920 x 1080). All the effort was necessary in order to fight the hungry game.

As for the game, it surely ran smoothly on Nvidia's gaming machine. According to Nvidia, the game had a constant frame per second rate situated between 30 and 40 while Crysis was running at high detail definition. However, the company confirmed that even if the gaming rig managed to deal with the game, it was "extremely taxing for the system". At some points during the game, there were serious drops in the frame rates (10 FPS or even below), which makes us wonder how much will cost a 100% Crysis-ready gaming system. What about a StarCraft one-on-one, anybody?