Crysis Warhead

Crysis is one of those games luxurious graphics cards are bought for. Indeed, the GeForce GTX 295 is one of the few cards capable of delivering a comfortable frame rate at 1280x1024 if you enable maximum graphics quality settings. AMD has nothing to respond with: the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is not fast enough while the Radeon HD 4890 CrossFireX tandem is not easy to use as it requires two PCI Express slots and a CrossFireX-compatible mainboard.

Overclocking is obvious rewarding here. The overclocked Inno3D has good performance at 1680x1050 and catches up with the SLI pair of GeForce GTX 285 cards.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

We disabled the integrated frame rate limiter in the game console for the sake of comparing the cards. The game’s built-in benchmarking options do not provide information about the bottom speed, so there is no such info in the diagrams.

The GeForce GTX 295 is not much better than its opponents and is only ahead at 1280x1024 where its high frame rate is redundant. The new card is equal to the Radeon HD 4890 CrossFireX at 2560x1600. Overclocking makes the GTX 295 unrivalled at resolutions of 1680x1050 and higher, but that’s not necessary for playing Quake Wars. It is enough to have a bottom speed of 30fps.