Page 6

Splinter CellIn 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.

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.

Yes the gaming benchmarks we'll purely look at the effect of memory bandwidth. Splinter Cell is absolutely one of the most horrible to use games to show memory performance as it is really graphics card dependant. We still include it as to show you that memory does not always has an effect.

Measuring CPU, Memory or mainboard performance normally should be done at the lowest monitor 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 simplely do not believe in such an explanation. 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. So what you need to look at in these results are the tiny differences between the selected platforms. You'll notice that 1024x768 often is different between the platforms and 1600x1200 often closer, the last one is because of the graphics card, it's running at it's maximum and thus a bottleneck.

CPU's differ, chipset platforms differ. We give you the big picture. All in all, fantastic performance. Yet memory bandwidth does not have an effect on Splinter Cell whatsoever. It made sense as it is a very graphics card dependant game. Let's have a look at some games that are not.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Powered with a highly optimized Quake III engine, high detail settings and of course a heavy time-demo to get test results, we will now use this software.

Powered by the Quake III Arena engine, the Wolfenstein universe explodes with the kind of epic environments, A.I., firepower and cinematic effects that only a game created by true masters can deliver. The dark reich's closing in. The time to act is now. Evil prevails when good men do nothing.

a highly decorated Army Ranger recruited into the Office of Secret Actions (OSA) tasked with escaping and then returning to Castle Wolfenstein in an attempt to thwart Heinrich Himmler's occult and genetic experiments. Himmler believes himself to be a reincarnation of a 10th century dark prince, Henry the Fowler, also known as Heinrich. Through genetic engineering and the harnessing of occult powers, Himmler hopes to raise an unstoppable army to level the Allies once and for all.

That being said, RTCW boasts very nice textures, impressive effects and fantastic character models.

Quite a difference as opposed to Splinter Cell. RTCW is a very good test to show memory performance as the graphics card is not limited or bottlenecked in any way. The bottleneck is the PC itself and changes in FSB, CPU frequency or memory bandwidth will translate directly into performance differences.

Some explanation: the first results is 400 MHz DDR OCZ memory clocked at it's default 2.5:3:3:8 timings. That is measured at 2.8 GHz with with a quad pumped 200 MHz FSB. The second one is our PDP memory DDR400 memory with the slow 3:4:4:8 timings. Now remember PC Mark 04 where I said I'd like to show you something? The next (3rd) step is the memory at 2:2:2:5 timings. We immediately see a change in performance

At the 4th result we enable the mainboards PEM mode, the fast timings still run perfectly fine, yet another performance boost.

Now we will increase the FSB until we can go no further, pure overclocking of the system bus. We know that we are limited at 243 MHz as that's the maximum for the CPU. IF the memory can cope with that FSB it's good. Then the faster the timings can be the better the memory is. This faster CPU speed versus faster memory will result in way higher performance. The DDR at 486 (2x243 MHz) would not run with PEM enabled. Also we had to increase voltage to 2.75 Volts and 2.5:4:4:8 timings to remain stable. And that's pretty good actually.

Let's move on and combine stuff in Doom 3 where we'll max everything out including the processor and monitor the overall results.