Just over three months after it announced that it was bringing back SLI, graphics manufacturer Nvidia had several operational SLI systems on display in its exhibition tent at this week's World Cyber Games event in San Francisco. Set up in a Doom 3 kiosk, the SLI demonstration machines were available to all WCG attendees.

　　Representatives from Nvidia shared SLI performance numbers by running a handful of benchmarks on a single-CPU 2.4Ghz AMD Opteron 250 system based on an undisclosed next-generation nForce chipset with two GeForce 6800 GT PCI-Express video cards running in SLI mode. Note that these preliminary SLI scores are from a very fast AMD Opteron 250 processor--comparable to the desktop Athlon 64 3700+ and Athlon 64 FX-53 processors.

　　The Opteron 250 GeForce 6800 GT SLI system scored an impressive 8,081 points in the recently released 3DMark05 benchmark. In comparison, a single GeForce 6800 GT scored 4,452 points on a slower 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor in a recent GameSpot 3DMark05 test. The SLI system also scored 18,176 points in 3DMark03, roughly 7,000 points higher than the average score for a single GeForce 6800 GT card.

　　According to Nvidia, production cards will have significantly higher scores because the rough drivers used in the demonstration system were originally built for the Intel "Tumwater" E7525 chipset and were not yet "tuned" for the AMD platform.