Far Cry 2

It may not have much in common with the original Far Cry aside from its name, but Ubisoft's Far Cry 2 offers a fantastic graphical experience in its depiction of a war-torn Africa rife with mercenaries and various factions fighting one another.  For our testing here, we've used the DirectX 10 rendering mode, with all in-game graphical details set to "Ultra High" to give these graphics boards a real test.

Even at 1680x1050, we see HIS' Radeon HD 4770 snag a definitive victory over the GeForce 9800 GT, to the tune of over 40%.

Once anti-aliasing is enabled here performance drops quite heavily, with the Radeon HD 4770 holding a 32% lead to keep its head just about above the water that is a thirty frames per second average frame rate.

Even at 1920x1200, the HIS Radeon HD 4770 remains significantly faster than NVIDIA's offering, to the tune of 39% here.

Performance finally drops below thirty frames per second on both boards at our highest test settings, even though our HIS card holds its hefty lead right to the bitter end.

Unreal Tournament 3

After making outings in BioShock and Gears of War, Unreal Engine 3 finally gets an outing in the latest iteration of the Unreal Tournament franchise which inspires it.  For our testing here, we've used a fly-by timedemo of the game's Shangri-La deathmatch level, with all in-game graphical details set to their highest levels.

We're pretty much entirely CPU limited at 1680x1050 in this title, leaving us with three figure performance numbers on both boards and nothing to tell between them.

The use of 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering in allows NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GT to eke out a lead of almost 6% at this resolution, while the Radeon HD 4770 continues to offer playable performance.

Moving up to 1920x1200 puts these two boards pretty much on level pegging once again, with top-notch performance all around at this resolution.

At our highest test settings both boards slip below sixty frames per second, while the GeForce 9800 GT holds a 3.5% lead here.