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.

Using multi-GPU configurations for Quake Wars does not make sense because even the ordinary Radeon HD 4890 ensures a twofold reserve of speed at 2560x1600. To remind you once again, the game’s network engine synchronizes all events with a frequency of 30Hz, so the maximum frame rate is limited to 30fps.

Anyway, we can note that starting from the resolution of 1680x1050 this test is won by the GeForce GTX 3-way SLI system. It enjoys a 22% lead over the second-best Radeon HD 4870 X2 4-way CrossFireX at 2560x1600.

Far Cry 2

Despite the obvious kinship, Far Cry 2 is a far less demanding application than Crysis Warhead, so every tested solution copes with the resolution of 2560x1600. The only exception is the single Radeon HD 4890 which must have been limited by its 16 RBEs.

The GeForce GTX 295 is the overall winner if you consider the whole of its consumer properties whereas the GeForce GTX 285 SLI looks like an optimal compromise between highest performance and noise. The addition of a third card to the SLI platform increases the average frame rate by 24% at 2560x1600, but we don’t think that this performance growth is worth the louder noise, especially as it is next to impossible to perceive that growth in the process of gaming.