NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard included benchmarking model on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each.   We should also note that we used the latest 64-bit beta build of the program.  Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput.

We had another very tight grouping in the multi-threaded POV-Ray benchmark.  It wouldn't be prudent to declare any one platform faster than another here, but the nForce 790i SLI Ultra does perform well, once again finishing just behind Intel's offering, but ahead of the previous nForces.

For this next batch of tests, we ran Kribibench v1.1, a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the folks at Adept Development.  Kribibench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported.  We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16 billion polys.

As you can see, we had a problem getting Kribibench to perform well on the nForce 780i SLI and 680i SLI, but it had no problem on the nForce 790i SLI Ultra.  In fact, the new ASUS and EVGA nForce 790i SLI Ultra motherboard performed at the head of the pack with the Sponge Explode model.  Although, the X48 squeaked out another close one with the Ultra model.