Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
We tested this game with 4X antialiasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled, along with "high" settings for all of the game's quality options except "Shader level" which was set to "Ultra." We left the diffuse, bump, and specular texture quality settings at their default levels, though. Shadows, soft particles, and smooth foliage were enabled. Again, we used a custom timedemo recorded for use in this review.

The results here look very similar to what we saw in Call of Duty 4. Three-way SLI has some overhead that makes it a little slower at lower resolutions, but it just doesn't slow down as the number of pixels onscreen rises.

Unreal Tournament 3
We tested UT3 by playing a deathmatch against some bots and recording frame rates during 60-second gameplay sessions using FRAPS. This method has the advantage of duplicating real gameplay, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

Because UT3 doesn't support multisampled antialiasing, we tested without AA. Instead, we just cranked up the resolution to 2560x1600 and turned up the game's quality sliders to the max. I also disabled the game's frame rate cap before testing.

This is a case where three-way's overhead just isn't worth it, mainly because UT3 doesn't support antialiasing. Nvidia does have an option in its control panel to force on antialiasing. When I tried it, though, it exacted a big performance hit with 4X AA. Playability was borderline even with three-way SLI. However, I didn't spend too much time on it, because I was concentrating on....