The first game we'll be looking at is Crytek's Crysis, a DX10 game released earlier this year. Crysis is well known for its demanding graphics, and can easily stress even top of the line video cards. For these tests I'm using Medium settings (out of Low, Med, High and Very High) at the three different resolutions. While the 8500GT does show a 40% gain in performance over the onboard graphics alone, running the two in SLI yields very little improvement, only 1-2% at best. Not that it makes much difference, at these levels of FPS the game is completely unplayable anyway.


Next is Lost Planet, which is also a DX10 game that came out late last year. All graphics settings were left at the default game values - only the resolution was changed in between runs. Just as we saw with Crysis, there was a 40% increase across the board when using the 8500GT over the onboard graphics alone. However this time an additional 25-30% improvement was gained by enabling GeForce Boost. While still not quite playable it's getting close, likely by dropping down to 1024x768 and/or changing a few settings to a lower value the GeForce Boost enabled SLI graphics would allow for a decent gaming experience.


The last game test is Half-Life 2 Episode 2, which also came out late last year, however the engine is still the same from the original game release back in 2004, and is obviously much less demanding than more recent titles. For these runs I used HOC's benchmark, with max graphic settings at the same three resolutions. Just as in the other two game tests, the 8500GT netted a solid 40% gain over the 8200 chipset, with the GeForce Boost yielding an additional 20-25% improvement in performance. The result is a completely playable game at the lowest resolution, and still decently smooth even at 1680x1050. The difference between the 8500GT card and Hybrid SLI is only 5-8 FPS, however when you're right on the threshold of 30 FPS, 5-8 either way can have a big impact on game experience.

Now that we've demonstrated what GeForce Boost is capable of, let's see how Hybrid Power performs.