Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
We tested Quake Wars with its highest in-game detail level settings and both 4X antialiasing and 16X aniso. We used the game's timedemo functionality with a custom-recorded demo. Unfortunately, our 256MB card repeatedly crashed when running the game at 1920x1440, so we don't have results for it at that resolution.

Even 256MB of graphics memory looks adequate for Quake Wars, that is until you want to run at resolutions higher than 1600x1200. Our 512MB and 1GB cards are a little faster, but not by nearly the margins we saw in CoD 4 and Crysis.

It's no surprise, then, that there's essentially no difference in performance between our 512MB and 1GB cards. There's a bit of a gap when we start pairing cards in SLI, but surprisingly, it's the 512MB configuration that comes out on top by a few frames per second.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Episode 2 brings higher quality textures than previous versions of Half-Life 2, and we were able to run the game with all its detail level settings maxed in addition to 4X antialiasing and 16X aniso. We used a custom demo in conjunction with the Source engine's timedemo functionality.

Yet again, we found no difference in performance between GeForce 8800 GT configurations with 512MB and 1GB of memory. Not even SLI could coax a meaningful margin between those memory sizes at the resolutions we used for testing. It is worth noting, however, that as with Quake Wars, this system can probably run Episode 2 with playable frame rates at resolutions higher than 1920x1440.

Our 256MB 8800 GT admirably hangs on at 1280x1024, nearly matching the performance offered by 512MB and 1GB cards. This victory is short-lived, though; the 256MB card stumbles at 1600x1200 and drops well below the playable threshold at 1920x1440.