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.

We've excluded the three- and four-way CrossFire X configs here since they don't support OpenGL-based games like this one.

The GeForce 9600 GT and 8800 GT SLI configurations don't run into any roadblocks in Quake Wars. The 9600 GT SLI setup is second in our performance-per-dollar chart, and our scatter plot confirms its attractive positioning. For about the same price as the GeForce 9800 GTX, the 9600 GT SLI config yields a 50% higher frame rate, crushing rival AMD CrossFire setups in the process.

Unlike in Call of Duty 4, we actually have somewhat of a value cut-off point here, too. Beyond the 9600 GT SLI setup, you have to pay almost twice as much for a relatively minor frame rate gain (with the GeForce 9800 GX2 and two-way GeForce 9800 GTX), and almost three times as much for a significant one (with three-way 9800 GTXs).

Of course, running an SLI setup has noteworthy downsides, primarily in terms of space taken, power consumed, and noise produced. Those looking for the best single-GPU value can't go wrong with either a GeForce 9600 GT or a GeForce 8800 GT. The latter's greater shader power might make it more worthwhile in future games, but we're not seeing a large gap between the two even at these very stressful settings.