Unreal Tournament 2004
Although eVGA's Ultra has a slight performance advantage in Unreal Tournament 2004, all the cards are pretty close. The "overclocked in the box" BFG and Chaintech cards don't show any significant advantage over their stock-clocked counterparts, either.
4X antialiasing and 16X anisotropic filtering spreads the field, and the e-GeForce 6800 Ultra continues to offer the best performance, albeit at the highest price point. The GTs aren't far behind. BFG's 20MHz core overclock is worth a few frames per second over PNY's stock GT.
While the GTs are able to stay close, the vanilla GeForce 6800s take a huge performance hit with 4X antialiasing and 16X aniso as we move to higher resolutions. At 1024x768, both cards flirt with 50 frames per second, but they can't keep it up at higher resolutions where frame rates take a huge dive. Not even the AA6800's 10% overclock can help the card—it's barely faster than inno3D's 6800 running at stock speeds. The fact that the two are so close makes me wonder if perhaps their 128MB memory size might be limiting performance.
Far Cry
Our Far Cry testing used a beta version of the game's 1.2 patch.
Far Cry is demanding enough to stress the cards without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, and as expected, eVGA's Ultra leads the way. We have to use resolutions higher than 1024x768 to see any performance advantage over our 6800 GTs, though.
Among the GTs, BFG's 20MHz overclock gives the card a slight edge over PNY's stock clock speeds, but it's pretty close. Chaintech's 10% overclock fuels a more significant performance advantage over inno3D's stock 6800, but both deliver playable frame rates at resolutions up to 1600x1200.
Far Cry's anisotropic filtering settings are handled in-game and only extend to 8X aniso. Still, when combined with 4X antialiasing, 8X aniso is more than demanding enough. The Ultra's out in front again, but the GTs continue to put on an impressive show. BFG's 20MHz core overclock continues to deliver slightly better performance than PNY's stock GT, but we're only talking one to two frames per second here. That's roughly the same advantage Chaintech's overclocked AA6800 has over the inno3D GeForce 6800, although performance for both cards is much lower than it is for the GTs.
