Crysis
We tested Crysis in the "Recovery" level, early in the game, using our standard FRAPS testing procedure (five sessions of 60 seconds each). The area where we tested included some forest, a village, a roadside, and some water—a good mix of the game's usual environments.

Because FRAPS testing is time-consuming and Crysis has much higher system requirements than other titles, we tested lower-end cards at 1680 x 1050 and higher-end models at 1920 x 1200. You'll find G92 SLI and CrossFire X configs in both sets of results.

At 1680 x 1050, the GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon HD 3870 are almost tied on the value scale in Crysis. That said, our scatter plot makes the GeForce 8800 GT look better than either, considering its higher performance and only marginally higher price. Moving up to the $300-400 range, the 9600 GT SLI setup looks like the best overall deal yet again—a perhaps surprising result, considering Crysis' apparently heavy use of shaders.

At 1920 x 1200, we tested only two single-GPU offerings: the GeForce 9800 GTX and the GeForce 8800 Ultra. The 9800 GTX is hands-down the best overall deal according to our performance-per-dollar chart, with the next step up—Nvidia's own GeForce 9800 GX2—costing almost twice as much for a 27% increase in performance. We didn't have the opportunity to test 9600 GT and 8800 GT SLI setups at this resolution, though, so it's difficult to draw a definite conclusion.