The monster went into surgery tonight for the first stage of the conversion. Out came the mondo slow Athlon 64 3700+. Someone mentioned that a machine may be either processor-bound or graphics card-bound. How do you know? Well, by pure dumb luck I'm in a position to find out.
Configuration before: Motherboard, Asus A8N32-SLI DeLuxe. Processor, Athlon 64 3700+. Memory 2 gig go fast OCZ. Graphics, EVGA 7600GT. No overclocking on anything. This is no state of the art machine. It runs SH4 fine, wide freakin' open. 1152 x 864 millions of colors (that's Mac talk in case you want to pause to be impressed. I thought not
) . External camera, looking at the sub, 19 fps. Not too shabby and very playable. Wouldn't want to see half that though, it would be nasty!
I switched for that beautiful Opteron 175, no other changes. Outside view looking at the sub is now a solid 30/31 fps! So, was this computer graphics or processor bound? I'd say we have a solid case of choking on the processor there! What's that mean for any SLI tests I might have been able to make? I most likely would have said SLI didn't gain me much because my processor couldn't handle one graphics card, much less two!
Results: Athlon 64 3700+ to Opteron 175 = 58% improvement in frame rate with the same 7600GT graphics card.
Ouch. There goes a lot of seemingly rock hard conclusions about relative performance under SLI. Looks like a good processor might be necessary to see big improvements.
I'm going away now to tear my computer apart again and install the 7900GS. Nothing can beat what I just did..........can it?
