Crysis
Rather than use a timedemo, I tested Crysis by playing the game and using FRAPS to record frame rates. Because this way of doing things can introduce a lot of variation from one run to the next, I tested each card in five 60-second gameplay sessions.

Also, I've chosen a new area for testing Crysis. This time, I'm on a hillside in the recovery level having a firefight with six or seven of the bad guys. As before, I've tested at two different settings, with the game's "High" quality presets and with its "Very high" ones, also.

Sadly, the GTX 280 is no magic bullet for Crysis performance, in case you were looking for one. Still, please note that the median low frame rate for the GTX 280 with the "High" quality settings is 25 FPS. That's not too bad at all, and for this reason, Crysis feels eminently playable on the GTX 280. Of course, I had to go and pick a hillside with ridiculously long view distances and an insane amount of vegetation and detail for my new testing area, so folks will still say Crysis doesn't run well. For what it's worth, FPS averages on the FRAPS readout jump into the 40s if you turn around and face uphill. Not that it matters—avoiding low frame rates is the key to playability, and the GTX does that.

Then again, so does the 9800 GX2.

Assassin's Creed
There has been some controversy surrounding the PC version of Assassin's Creed, but I couldn't resist testing it, in part because it's such a gorgeous, well-produced game. Also, hey, I was curious to see how the performance picture looks for myself. The originally shipped version of this game can take advantage of the Radeon HD 3870 GPU's DirectX 10.1 capabilities to get a performance boost with antialiasing, and as you may have heard, Ubisoft chose to remove the DX10.1 path in an update to the game. I chose to test the game without this patch, leaving DX10.1 support intact.

I used our standard FRAPS procedure here, five sessions of 60 seconds each, while free-running across the rooftops in Damascus. All of the game's quality options were maxed out, and I had to edit a config file manually in order to enable 4X AA at this resolution. Eh, it worked.

Wow, the Radeons just look exceptionally strong here. Even the Radeon HD 2900 XT, which lacks DX10.1 support, comes out ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTX—a rare occurrence. With DX10.1, the Radeon HD 3870 isn't too far behind the GTX 260, amazingly enough. The new GeForces do post solid gains over the older ones, though, and the SLI-on-a-stick 9800 GX2 doesn't look so hot.