Doom 3 needs no introduction. It is the de-facto OpenGL benchmark for today's video cards, as it can still bring the most powerful beasts to their knees at higher resolutions. For benchmarking, we used the High Quality mode, with all of the glitzy features in Advanced Options enabled (with the exception of vertical sync). Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were changed in-game through the console -- the NVIDIA control panel was set to "Application-controlled".

Doom 3 performance starts out with the 7800 GTX having a slight lead over the 6800 GT SLI pair in 1024x768 no-AA/no-AF. With such video cards, the 2.25 GHz Athlon 64 is the bottleneck at 1024x768, which explains why the seemingly-more-powerful 6800 GT SLI setup scored lower (SLI has a slight overhead). Regardless, as the resolution, anti-aliasing, and anisotropic filtering levels are turned up, the 6800 GT SLI pair shapes up and increases its lead over the 7800 GTX. The 6800 Ultra and X850 XT PE are neck-and-neck, though generally pretty far behind the other pack. All in all, when it comes to AA/AF performance, the 7800 GTX places in between the 6800 Ultra and 6800 GT SLI pair.

Far Cry

Far Cry is a very shader- and texture-heavy DirectX 9 game. At higher resolutions with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, it can bring any current video card to the floor. For benchmarking, we used HardwareOC's Far Cry benchmarking tool. Settings used were "Ultra detail", in-game AA/AF, no HDR, no geometry instancing, no normal map compression, and it was all done with the Ubisoft Regulator demo. Four runs were taken at every resolution, as Far Cry's first two results are always off.




The results here are interesting indeed. As usual, the 6800 Ultra ends up last in both non-AA/non-AF and AA/AF results. Due to SLI overhead, the 6800 GT pair is edged out by the 7800 GTX in the first set of results, but the tables turn (or rather shift) in favour of the SLI pair once AA and AF are enabled. A note of interest is that the X850 XT PE takes less of a hit for AA/AF than the GeForce cards do -- the X850 XT PE ends up placing first in all resolutions of AA/AF tests.