Page 9 - Splinter Cell 1.2b

Splinter CellNew in our Benchmark suite is the very popular game Splinter Cell. Making a believable world for a spy to play in is quite a daunting task, but the levels are varied, filled with appropriate objects, and designed so that you usually dont have to choose between too many paths. It wouldve been great if you couldve had several points of entrance and that way get a lot more replay-value. Sam and the rest of the characters do look terrific, with high polygon models and both crisp and appropriate looking textures. What really separates Splinter Cell from most recent action games is the use of shadows. Splinter Cell uses the Unreal engine, which weve seen in several great looking games the past months, but UbiSoft also added improved lighting. By using real-time cast shadows, lightmaps, etc, this title gives you some of the best looking shadows to date.

In response to the growing use of sophisticated digital encryption to conceal potential threats to the national security of the United States, the NSA (National Security Agency) has ushered forth a new dawn of intelligence-gathering techniques. This top-secret initiative is dubbed Third Echelon. Denied to exist by the U.S. government, Third Echelon deploys elite intelligence-gathering units consisting of a lone field operative supported by a remote team. Like a sliver of glass, a Splinter Cell is small, sharp, and nearly invisible.

You have the right to spy, steal, destroy and assassinate, to ensure that American freedoms are protected. If captured, the U.S. government will disavow any knowledge of your existence.

You are Sam Fisher.

You are a Splinter Cell.

Splinter Cell is a DirectX 8/9 title and can handle Pixel Shaders if your card supports it. The downside of this nice piece of software is that it has different modes for different classes of hardware. We designed a configuration that is nearly the same for all graphics cards, however any low-end graphics card that does not support Pixel Shaders will reproduce a slightly different score. Secondly Splinter Cell has two shadowing techniques, Projector and Buffer mode. We force Projector mode in high detail on all graphics cards. Again, graphics cards without shader capabilities will run into a problem as they do not support it. We are talking about GeForce4 MX and earlier models only. With that in mind this software really is an excellent benchmark. Small sidenote, we are not using the standard timedemo's. We made one ourselves that stresses the filtrate of a graphics card and will utilize a CPU very little.

Let's take a look at some of the benchmark numbers. Unlike some of the future games Splinter Cell doesnt use per-pixel lighting, so the framerate should be quite good even for owners of mid-end PCs.

As you can see the GeForce FX series really scales nicely here. The reason you do not see so much comparative benchmarks with other graphics cards is due to the fact we recently switched all time-demo's and benchmarks to prevent any results with driver cheating. With time this overview will grow larger and larger.

The 380 core / 730 mem entries of course represent the overclocked results for the 5600 at the Athlon XP 1800+ based system.

As you can see the 5200 does not have a clue what it's doing. It's unable to handle Splinter Cell, the 5600 does that job barely. The Timedemo we used is a tad CPU sensitive so the results would have been better on a high-end machine (thus very fast CPU). However, in my opinion these are low & mid range graphics cards and thus should be tested on a similar system. We left out the results for Anti Aliasing in this particular benchmark. The lighting model causes odd visible rendering errors within AA and reproduces odd results. Ubisoft posted and confirmed this on their website.