Benchmarks: Just Cause 2, Crysis Warhead
For testing Just Cause 2 the built-in benchmark tool was used. There are three tests to choose from and we went with the most demanding called "Concrete Jungle". Fraps was still used to record the minimum frame rates and monitor coherence from the results we were getting from the benchmarking tool. Best in-game visuals settings were selected along with 8xAA/16xAF.
The GeForce GTX 460 SLI cards provided a 62% performance gain over the single card configuration when testing with Just Cause 2. As a result the GTX 460 SLI setup was 7% faster than the GeForce GTX 480, 42% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 and even 4% faster than the Radeon HD 5970.
Crysis Warhead Benchmarks
Rather than using the Crysis Warhead benchmark we elected to record frame rates over 60 seconds of actual gameplay using Fraps. We used action from the level "All The Fury" using the enthusiast quality setting with AA and AF disabled.
Crysis Warhead is known to be a highly demanding game but with a pair of GeForce GTX 460 SLI graphics cards you wouldn't know it. Adding in a second card saw a cool 84% rise in frame rates. This performance increase allowed the SLI cards to outperform the GeForce GTX 480 by a 20% margin while the Radeon HD 5870 was beaten by a 28% margin.
The GTX 460 SLI cards were about 14% slower than the Radeon HD 5970, but when overclocked there was a 20% performance boost, enough to surpass the dual GPU Radeon 5970.