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 natively support multisampled antialiasing, we tested without AA. Instead, we turned up the game's quality sliders to the max and disabled the game's frame rate cap.

Epic's latest multiplayer shooter paints a picture similar to Quake Wars and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, in that the GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9600 GT SLI setups are the two best-positioned offerings, both according to our value chart and our scatter plot. We should nonetheless point out that the Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire config sits close to the dual 9600 GTs.

Above the $300-400 range, the next step up looks to be the three-way CrossFire X configuration with the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and Radeon HD 3870. This dual-card, three-GPU setup produces the highest frame rate we've seen in UT3 so far, and it costs almost the same as a much slower, single-GPU GeForce 8800 Ultra.