Performance in Third-Person Shooters

Hitman: Blood Money

The standard GeForce 8800 Ultra is up to 10% faster than the standard GeForce 8800 GTX, and the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme increases this advantage to 16%. This has no practical value, however, for a third-person shooter unless you switch to an extremely high display resolution. The resolution of 1920x1200 is becoming more widespread considering the arrival of rather inexpensive 24” monitors.

Tomb Raider: Legend

The XFX card is not even 10% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX, but both of them, together with the standard GeForce 8800 Ultra, deliver excellent performance in all the common resolutions. They are unrivalled, actually. The Radeon HD 2900 XT occupies a different market niche where it is successfully competing with the GeForce 8800 GTS, losing to it in high resolutions a little.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent

We try to get the best quality of graphics from each game, so we chose HDR in favor of FSAA and benchmarked the cards with anisotropic filtering only.

The XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme enjoys a 14% advantage now, yet it does not give you any tangible gaming benefits in comparison with the GeForce 8800 GTX. In other words, why should you buy the $829 card if the $599 one is just as good for the job?