Upping the ante to "Ultra Quality" we see a major pull in the numbers on both the 6800 and the 6600 GT.

What I think is most worth mentioning is that at no time regardless of the quality settings being maxed and the screen resolution being kicked up to 1600x1200, did the game dip below a 40 fps average.  In actual gameplay, things remain smooth and without any noticeable bumps or pauses.  That says quite a bit for a sub $200 midrange card.

Overclocking

Midrange VGA cards have always been effective weapons of choice because of price and the frequent ability of end users to milk even more from them by overclocking.  We dropped in the Coolbits registry key to open up the clock frequency tab within the display properties and started playing.  The 'auto detect' feature with this is nice but only a partially useful feature in my mind.  Typically, the auto detect will find overclocking limits with the core and memory speeds that may allow a game to play maybe but are unfortunately far from stable.  In this case, the auto detect found max settings to be 564MHz on the core and 1.04GHz on the memory.  After adjusting the settings manually and playing for a few hours we found the true stable max settings to be 570MHz on the core and 1.02GHz on the memory to give us gameplay with no hang-ups or visual anomalies. 

The graphs below were run at 1024x768 resolution with both HL2 and Doom3 set to a 'speed' setting as discussed earlier.  Half Life2 provided us more of the same whether overclocked or not to our dismay.  Doom3 proved to be an entirely different matter.