Page 15 - Splinter Cell

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. However 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 seperates 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 in 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.

I will start with explaining you on how to read the results.

First off, all test have been done on a 2.8 GHz test system with 1 GB Memory on an Intel 865 Platform. Since a lot of games are now actually CPU limited for the graphics card we also threw in some results taken on that same platform yet at a 3.4 GHz clockspeed with a lock on AGP/PCI/SRC at 66/33/100.

The 5950U is a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra who did a test run on that same platform with the same drivers. Again, all tests have been done on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 except the 3.4 GHz results. I actually was quite amazed how many games ran into a CPU limitation.

** Trilinear Optimizing setting disabled - This function needs explanation. At standard this setting is enabled. Basically it offers a mixture of optimized Bilinear and Trilinear filtering. At driver level we can disable it and once disabled we have full Trilinear filtering. We included the results with the setting disabled as well, this is after all a high-end board. A side note, this is a standard setting for the ForceWare drivers, the 5950 Ultra therefore also uses this setting at default.

So, we start off today's tests with Splinter Cell. Right, AA can't be properly tested with Splinter Cell, so no results for Antialiasing. As you can see, the 6800 Ultra produces really good numbers. Even with 16x Anisotropic filtering enabled you'll handle over 50 FPS in 1600x1200x32.

Again, we left out the results for Antialiasing in this particular benchmark. The lighting model causes odd visible rendering errors within AA and reproduces odd results.