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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.

Let's start off with an explanation on how to look at the results. The cards that have been tested are of course the Radeon x800 XL from HiS. Next to that two GeForce 6600 GT cards in SLI mode from Prolink which we tested a couple of days ago. Next to that the Gigabyte 3D1 in Dual GPU (Two actual graphics cores on one card) mode. Also you'll see results of a NVIDIA reference 128 MB GeForce 6600 GT and a reference 256 MB GeForce 6800 GT. All cards use the same driver and are tested (of course) on the same PC under similar conditions. In the upcoming week we'll also add new Radeon x850 XT and x850 XT PE results in another article regarding HiS videocards.

Let's enable 8 levels of anisotropic filtering and see what happens, shall we:

AF really isn't a big deal anymore isn't it? So turn it on at all times as you will love the image quality! Keep in mind, the higher a graphics card will go in resolution, the harder it'll be for it to render decent framerates. That's where you need to focus on in terms of looking at a graphics cards power.

The new Catalyst 5.2 driver definitely did give the XL series some extra magic power and not a little.