Over the last few months there has been a lot of talk about AMD/ATI's and NVIDIA's plans to expand the number of graphics processors in our computers and now the first benchmarks with NVIDIA's new 3-way SLI has been published. Long ago NVIDIA launched Quad SLI, but it has now gone for a more affordable solution where you can run three graphics cards in one system, although only extreme high-end cards like the 8800 GTX and Ultra. At Tomshardware Taiwan they've published the first performance preview of 3-way SLI and the results are not too shabby.

The article compares one and three GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards. As expected the difference is quite small with normal resolutions, but when you climb above 1920x1080 things start to happen. At some resolutions the scaling is about twice that of a single card, but when you move up to 2560x1600 some games start to show close to triple performance scaling and a playable frame rate.

Three-way SLI is performing pretty much as expected, perhaps even better, and as NVIDIA probably still has some work to do with the drivers things should only improve from here on. It's pretty clear though that you need a monitor above average for 3-way SLI to make sense. The preview is in Chinese, but the diagrams and tables are in English and summarize the scaling quite well.