Far Cry

Remember when we mentioned the CPU playing a big role with today's high-end graphics? Case in point; the 1280x1024 results show nary a difference across the board. It's pretty obvious here that the cards will have no problem with this resolution, and will in fact benefit from a faster processor.

At 1600x1200, we can see the differences a little more, though the CPU is still having some trouble feeding the video cards. At these settings, the MSI NX7800GTX in SLI mode is clearly on top.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Guess it's time to start saving the loose change as we're in dire need of a CPU upgrade around here. All the cards are pretty much dead even across the board at both resolutions, with the exception of the ATI X850 Platinum which has fallen behind in the pack. Between the 7800 GTX boards, the Albatron 7800 GTX has a slight lead over the MSI part by a small margin, but nothing that is noticeable in gameplay.

Half-Life 2 (1600x1200, 4xAA/16xAF)

	Min	Max	Ave
MSI NX7800GTX	42	123	75.9
MSI NX7800GTX SLI	39	140	67.6
Albatron 7800 GTX	46	133	84.6
ATI X850 XT	42	115	74.8
NV 6800 GT SLI	42	112	66.1

This game needs no introduction, as anyone who picked up a $500 video card in the last year probably did so for this. On the D3_C17_12 map (Follow Freeman), the Albatron 7800 GTX finishes on top for single card performance, but again, you'll be hard pressed to notice this in actual gameplay.

Oddly enough, the average FPS was lower with the MSI NX7800GTX, and this was also the case in our Benchem'All! testing (which we did not include). While it's impossible to perfectly replicate the gameplay for each card, we do follow a specific course, and the gameplay is similar, but the benchmarks say otherwise. I should point out that the gaming experience was fine, and we did not feel the SLI configuration hurt the game at all.

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