3DMark06 was pretty much the defacto standard in benchmarking video cards over the last two years. Although dependent on CPU processing power almost as much as the graphics card for getting high scores, it's still one of the first programs I load up when I test out new hardware. Here we see that with a low resolution (1280x1024) and no AA/AF, the 9800 scores nearly as well as the 260.
3DMark Vantage is Futuremark's latest benchmark utility, and has become my favorite for load testing the GPU. Obviously this benchmark is heavily GPU dependent. The 260 fares better here, due to the more advanced graphics requirements, although the 9800 isn't far behind.
Now let's look at some real game tests, starting with Crysis.
