Crysis
I was a little dubious about the GPU benchmark Crytek supplies with Crysis after our experiences with it when testing three-way SLI. The scripted benchmark does a flyover that covers a lot of ground quickly and appears to stream in lots of data in a short period, possibly making it I/O bound—so I decided to see what I could learn by testing the 9600 GT and its closest competitors with FRAPS instead. I chose to test in the "Recovery" level, early in the game, using our standard FRAPS testing procedure (five sessions of 60 seconds each). The area where I tested included some forest, a village, a roadside, and some water—a good mix of the game's usual environments.

Please note that all of the results you see below for the Radeons come from a newer graphics driver, version 8.451-2-080123a, than the ones we used for the rest of our tests. This newer driver improved Crysis performance noticeably. These driver enhancements for Crysis should be available to the public soon in Catalyst 8.3.

The cards tend to cluster together at 1280x800, and multi-GPU rendering doesn't seem to help performance much at all. A low of 23 frames per second isn't too bad, when you think about it, and I'd classify any of these cards as running Crysis at playable speeds at this resolution. Obviously, there's very little difference between them.

At 1680x1050, the field begins to separate just a little, while CrossFire and SLI actually start to help. The 9600 GT is technically faster than the Radeons, but not by enough to matter much.

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.

The UT3 results pretty much confirm what we've seen elsewhere. Any of these cards can, incredibly, run UT3 well enough at this resolution, but you'll probably want to drop down to 1920x1200 for the best experience with either of the Radeon HD cards. Their performance seemed a little choppy at times to me. And, heh, you'll probably have drop down a little bit to match your monitor's native resolution.