Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Valve’s game gets a bigger performance boost than Id Software’s, but the gamer has no practical benefits anyway. The GeForce 9800 GTX is as fast as the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 here, which is good considering the higher price of the latter. This doesn’t make the new card special, though.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.
The GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, GeForce 9800 GTX and Radeon HD 3870 X2 behave in a similar manner in every test mode, so your choice depends on your personal preferences as well as on the price and availability of the particular graphics card. We guess the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB has the most optimal price/performance ratio which has helped it become so popular in the gaming community.
