ASUS ENGTX460 DirectCU TOP SLI and 3D Vision Surround Gaming Review :: Introduction

The hardware enthusiast looking for a new video card often has to make sacrifices on price/performance of their new cards. Not everyone can buy the latest and greatest cards so they are left with the choice to buy a mid-range card and buying a second one later or buying thee more expensive one today.

The two graphics card vendors AMD and NVIDIA have released solutions to meet the needs of the hardware enthusiast that wants to buy one card today and have higher performance with one or more cards added to the system tomorrow. NVIDIA's solution is called SLI or Scalable Link Interface while AMD's solution is called CrossfireX.

NVIDIA launched the GF100 Graphics Fermi 100 architecture late last year as their first graphics chip family to support DirectX 11. The GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 video cards were known for their high performance, high power requirements and their heat. These cards offer great performance but due to the size of the chip (3.2 billion transistors), and other factors are not accessible to the mainstream gaming public at their current price points.

The sweet spot for selling mass amounts of a new video card is around $200 as that is about the same amount of money that the mainstream CPUs are going for and offers a decent performance jump over the integrated graphics found on those CPUs in most cases. NVIDIA's partners did not have a card for that sweet spot, until the launch of the GeForce GTX 460 card. Two of these cards can be paired together in SLI mode to offer even better performance for the same cost as a GTX 480. Will two cards outperform the 480? Is it a worthy upgrade? Will PhysX matter? And what is this new feature called 3D Vision Surround Gaming? Does SLI matter? These answers and more lie ahead in the review.