Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
We tested Call of Duty 4 by recording a custom demo of a multiplayer gaming session and playing it back using the game's timedemo capability. We cranked up the in-game detail levels, including texture filtering, and set the resolution to 1600x1200 with 4X antialiasing.

Score one for the 8800 GT, at least when it has 512MB of memory or more. The GeForce cards have a huge performance advantage in Call of Duty 4, and among them, Asus' EN8800GT rises to the, er, top. This result is expected given that the card has the highest clock speeds of the 8800 GTs. However, even this most extreme example of factory overclocking of an 8800GT is only good for about a 10% boost in framerates over the stock-clocked models.

There's a much bigger gap between the pack of 8800 GTs and the lowly 256MB Alpha Dog, which is actually slower than a couple of Radeon HD 3850s. Clearly, 256MB of memory isn't cutting it here, although it would probably be fine at lower resolutions and quality levels. Note, also, that we're seeing far from perfect scaling with SLI; a pair of the Palit cards running together is only 1.66 times faster than one on its own.

HIS's IceQ3 3870 comes out ahead in the Radeon world, just edging out Asus' take on the same graphics chip. Scores are pretty close across the 3800 series, with only six frames per second separating the fastest 3870 from the slowest 3850. Keep in mind that we're not running any 3850s with 256MB of memory. The Sapphire card, which is the slowest of the lot, obviously isn't gaining much from its gigabyte of RAM.

Crysis
Crysis is easily the most demanding PC game on the market, and we were able to get reasonably playable frame rates on all the cards with the game's high-quality settings. Of course, we ran at a relatively modest 1024x768 display resolution without antialiasing. The scores below come from a custom timedemo recorded in the game's first level.

The GeForce cards dominate again, but not by nearly as much as they did in Call of Duty. SLI scaling is relatively unimpressive, with our dual Palit cards losing out to a number of single-card configs that offer higher clock speeds. Note that we have seen better SLI scaling on the 8800 GT with Nvidia's 169.28 beta drivers.

Asus' EN8800GT comes out ahead again. However, the card is barely three frames per second faster than the slowest 8800 GT. That doesn't count the 256MB Alpha Dog, though; it's mired near the back of the pack with the 3850s.

Among the Radeons, we have the 3870s out ahead again. Performance here seems largely dependent on GPU clock speed, although as you can see, higher clocks don't buy much in the way of extra frames per second. Even the 3870s only have a couple of FPS on the 3850s.