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First up is Far Cry.  Setting things up for a speed run (eye candy off) let's see if this is a little engine that can.

Both cards sport 128mb of local memory so you can see pretty quickly that the horsepower advantage rests solidly on the more expensive and technically efficient GeForce 6800.  While the numbers were not thrilling, we did find gameplay to be smooth with an occasional shutter if the action heated up at higher resolutions.  At 1024x768 resolution, we never perceived any problems or lag during gameplay.  Very respectable.  Let's see how Half Life 2 fares.

HL2 is a graphics intensive game and as such these scores weren't all that surprising.  Raw frame rate scores here are nothing to write home about but this was not unexpected.  Like Far Cry, normal gameplay at 1024 resolution, gave us an excellent experience with only a very rare shutter when the action was thickest.