S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

The game doesn't support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.

At a resolution of 1280x1024 the MSI NX8800GT OC is only 3.5% behind the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX. The gap grows 9-11% at the higher resolutions but the minimum speed of the GeForce 8800 GT is below 25fps at 1920x1200, which is a problem since your aiming accuracy is most important for this game. The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB is still slow in this game.

Unreal Tournament 3

Contrary to the developer's promises, Unreal Tournament 3 doesn't support FSAA even in the Windows Vista environment. Forcing FSAA from the graphics card's driver doesn't produce any effect. Perhaps the FSAA support will be added by means of a patch.

Unlike the hardware-burning Crysis, this game has a rather moderate appetite. Moreover, it doesn't have a predilection to any of the GPU developers and runs equally fast on the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT and ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. The MSI card is about 10% behind the GeForce 8800 GTX at 1920x1200 and differs by only 4% from the speed of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB. The average frame rate is always above 60fps, so every graphics card included into this review allows playing this game with full comfort.