Crysis

The game being too hard at its Very High level of detail, we benchmarked the cards without FSAA to get a more playable speed.

Although we don’t use FSAA in Crysis, the Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 1024MB is slower tha the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX at 1920x1200. As we know, the G92 is quite competitive to the G80 in memory subsystem performance despite having fewer ROPs and a narrower memory bus. So, the reason must be in the less efficient texture processor architecture of the G92 chip in comparison with the G80.

The overall performance level is too low for the Very High level of detail to be playable. Among modern single-processor graphics cards an overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra is the only one you can try to play the game on in that mode. We don’t expect the GeForce 9800 GTX to conquer this peak, either. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 couldn’t do that, so Nvidia’s GeForce 9800 GX2 and the upcoming multi-GPU solutions from AMD are the only solutions that can change anything in this game.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The frame rate is fixed at 30fps in this game as this is the rate at which the physical model is being updated at the server. Thus, this 30fps speed is the required minimum for playing the game.

The increased clock-rates of the Gainward card lift it up to top place, but the advantage over the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is negligible and is not worth the price difference. The reference version of the card, with 512MB of memory, isn’t any worse for playing this game.