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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. 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.

First let me start by saying that measuring CPU and mainboard performance normally should be done at the lowest resolution possible. You'll notice that on most sites you'll get the results at 640x480 ect. While that is a very good method to produce static numbers to show performance differences I simple do not believe in them. I want you to look at real world performance, thus we run the system like you would do at home, at normal resolutions and normal settings.

CPU's differ, chipset platforms differ. We try to give you the big picture. It's really hard to compare graphics cards versus mainboards very well, judging from the results, this platform beats my pride and joy primary 3.6 GHz test-system. It's obvious we are looking at state of the art results here, high-end systems. the results have been taken in both Single and SLI mode to show you the differences also notice with SLI enabled on 4 GHz that 8x or 16x anisotropic filtering at 1600x1200 does not even make a difference.

Gaming however is where the AMD64 platform always has been very strong over Intel Pentium 4 solutions, the results show that, look at both the 3800+ and 4000+ results in 1024x768. Of course you are also platform dependant (the mainboard chipset), but this gives a good overview. At higher resolutions you will run into bottleneck. The above results are in Single mode (no SLI) with no Anisotropic filtering enabled.

All in all, fantastic performance.