Can two BFGTech GeForce 9600 GT OC video cards running in SLI offer a better gaming experience than a single GeForce 8800 GTX? HardOCP put two 9600 GT OCs from BFGTech to the test using Call Of Duty 4, Crysis and UT3 and the results were rather impressive:

One thing we found is that this statement greatly depends on the games you are actually using. Crysis, for example, isn't as efficient at multi-GPU performance utilization compared to other games like COD 4 or UT3. In Crysis we found the GeForce 8800 GTX to have a real-world advantage over two 9600 GTs in SLI. However, if you look at our apples-to-apples testing you will see that the 8800 GTX and two 9600 GTs in SLI do trade blows in performance. Sometimes the 8800 GTX is faster, sometimes the two 9600 GTs in SLI are faster at the same settings as you play the game. It is certainly quite possible that future game patches or driver updates can improve SLI performance enough for the two 9600 GTs to actually surpass the 8800 GTX in Crysis.

In the two other games we tested, COD 4 and UT3, NVIDIA's claims are true to an extent. Two 9600 GTs in SLI did give us higher framerates than an 8800 GTX, that is fact. It is also fact that they didn't improve the gameplay experience over the 8800 GTX. In COD 4 at 1920x1200 and 4X AA the game is at its highest settings possible, and both setups were playable at this setting. At 2560x1600 with No AA both setups were also playable, and both were not at 2X AA at this resolution. Therefore the image quality was identical between them, and the gameplay experience was the same, even though the 9600 GTs had higher framerates.

So depending on the game, in real-world gaming framerates two 9600 GTs in SLI may be faster than an 8800 GTX, however the real-world gameplay experiences are likely to be much the same. One thing to keep in mind with all of this testing is that this was with a stock, default clocked GeForce 8800 GTX, no OC model was used. So if you have a GeForce 8800 GTX that is clocked higher by the add-in-board partners the GTX may win in more situations. Of course on the flip side there are higher clocked GeForce 9600 GTs as well. At this stage we can call it a draw between the two; two GeForce 9600 GTs in SLI are going to allow the same gameplay experience as one GeForce 8800 GTX.