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Splinter Cell

First 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 (excluding the GeForce 3 series) 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 fillrate of a graphics card and will utilize the 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.

Right then, benchmark time. This is the only test that we'll do with "just" Anisotropic filtering. All other tests will have 6x antialiasing enabled and no less that 16 levels of anisotropic filtering! The resolution you need to focus on is 1600x1200, the highest (for us to test) possible resolutions. I need really to pick up a monitor that can do 2x1 so that we could test this baby even better.

Anyway, as you can see, not enough. Scores between the x800 XL 256 & 512 MB are 100% similar.

Far Cry

If you haven't played the demo or the game, well shame on you! Far Cry's story centers on Jack Carver, who has put a mysterious past behind him in favor of a less stressful life chartering boats in the South Pacific... or so he thinks. After delivering a female journalist to an uncharted island, Jack's boat is attacked and he subsequently finds himself stranded against a group of mercenaries, at which point his adventure begins. Graphically Far Cry is amazing; the action takes place in a huge, brightly colored environment with dense jungle style shrubbery, peacefully quiet beaches and large indoor areas. The excellent shadow effects simply bring the game to life with reflections on walls and even on your own weapons as you creep through the trees. Its like something straight out of a movie, helped along by the lighting and tight, crisp textures.  

For Far Cry we did things a bit different then normal. First off, the game has been patched to version 1.3. Secondly where possible we made sure that the graphics cards were forced to run Shader Model 3.0 if possible. Next to that we are using our own Guru3D.com constructed timedemo to prevent driver cheats.

The results (frames per second) that you see below are a lot lower then in normal conditions as we modified configuration settings and make it as rough as it can get on the graphics card. All in all, at this time and moment, this is one of the best tests we can offer you to benchmark DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards.

As Antialiasing results were not consistent between different brands, so we can't use them in this part of the benchmark results.

Far Cry is a game where things get more interesting.

Look at 1024x768, at that resolution the game is actually CPU is limited and while the graphics card(s) want to go faster the CPU can't calculate the actual frames and present it to the graphics card driver fast enough.

So that's like the highest game setting available plus a few additions from our side and that does effect the framerate. The additional AA and AF tests is the average framerate measured over an intensive shader rich timedemo, also with that custom Guru3D.com written configuration file.

Now since we have such an extensive and difficult image quality configuration we immediately see that the 512 MB is helping here. In fact at 1600x1200 it actually beats the x850 XT.