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Splinter Cell 3 - Chaos Theory
Sam Fisher returns for his third installment. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the third game in the acclaimed Splinter Cell series, manages to improve the games visuals, make the gameplay a bit more nonlinear and adds some new gameplay modes to the already exhaustive Splinter Cell brand. Anyone who has seen Chaos Theory in action can attest to its visual masterpiece. Dynamic lighting is back in a big way. No longer are shadows blobby, elongated representations of the characters. Now we have shadows that are detailed and exact.
Another of the biggest renovations of the graphics is the amazing use of bump and normal mapping. Now when you are sulking around in the shadows of espionage Sam actually has a recognizable face, with expressions and features that look real. Rather than the flat textured faces we have seen in the games previous.
The game is so darn good.
Splinter Cell 3 has been out for a while now and we recently recorded a timedemo. Finally we have a title that can utilize and stress a high-end graphics card. Let me tell you what we enabled in our configuration.
First off, we disabled Antialiasing to make future proof benchmarks. Why? Because there is a difference in the benchmark modes between ATI and NVIDIA. The x number in "AntiAliasing=x" DOES NOT correspond with the number of anti-aliasing samples. Next to that Shader Model 3.0 and enable HDR rendering, anti-aliasing will result in AA always be disabled.
- Shadow Quality is set to high resolution.
- Anisotropic filtering is set to 16x
- Trilinear filtering is used
- Specular lighting is enabled
- Soft shadows are enabled
- Parallax mapping is enabled
- High Dynamic Range rendering is enabled
- Hardware Shadow mapping is enabled
Okay as usual ...
let's start off with an explanation on how to look at the results. You are looking at the score measured in an average framerate. "50" would equal the average performance at 50 rendered 3D frames per second. Remember that our absolute minimum is 30 and we consider 60 or above to be very optimal. Since we are looking at high-end graphics cards we can set the bar very high.Sixteen levels of Anisotropic filtering (AF) are enabled here and we had HDR active. This game is pretty much is as tough as it can get for any graphics card of build year 2005, and the on-screen results are short from breathtaking. 1920x1200 equals to peanuts .. even with IQ settings set very high and it's doing that exactly at a 109 frames per second framerate (FPS).
All cards above are in either Crossfire (ATI) or SLi (NVIDIA) mode. The Crossfire rig does 109 FPS, as comparison, a single X1900 XTX would push ~52 FPS.
That's really breathtaking performance.
BTW you'll notice throughout the review that in one occasion the 7900 GTX 512MB SLi cards win, and in other X1900 XT Crossfire. Both setups are extremely close. Mind you that the NVIDIA cards are measured at our NFORCE4 platform. The memory and CPU on both mainboards are equal.
Quake 4
The Quake 4 story picks up where Quake 2 left off, with the Space Marines fighting the Strogg, but this time on the enemy's home planet of Stroggos. You'll take the role of Corporal Kane as the Marines attempt to basically annihilate their Borg-like enemies. You'll crash land in the middle of trench warfare, and it's off to the races as one superior officer after another sends you off to retrieve people, destroy key locations, and infiltrate deep behind enemy lines. Sometimes you'll be accompanied by game-controlled team members -- typically a technical officer who can repair your armor, and/or a corpsman who can heal you up to full health. Quake 4's built on id Software's impressive DOOM 3 engine. It was first thought that the engine was only good at showing dark, indoor areas, but this is the proof that id's engine is actually much more robust. And the amusing part here is that while Quake 4 gives us environments that are every bit as detailed as DOOM 3, it's also got much faster-paced action with both squadmates and half a dozen enemies going at it at once.
If your computer was able to play Doom 3 at a reasonable frame rate, you should be able to play it without major problems. This is a beautifully rendered game featuring a lot of bump mapping, specular lightning and 16x anisotropy option. It has a lot of small details like panels ripped out of the walls, huge machines in the background doing what huge machines usually do and even bullet decals on bodies. Raven paid a lot of attention to the small things which in the end makes all the difference. Another part that should concern a lot of potential gamers is it's The way it's meant to be played mark. Even if the logo doesn't appear, it's already obvious that it's going to have an edge over ATI graphic cards. With that being said, all modern cards can play Quake 4 quite well. We created our own time-demo and defined a configuration based on the best image quality settings possible. Let's have a look:
The results above are a test run of our own custom timedemo which we made freely available on the web for you to try at home. With no image quality settings like AA and AF enabled you get the score as shown above. But it's not really a challenge for high-end cards is it? Mind you that our Quake 4 is configured at the best possible settings, everything is maxed out and enabled. The card performs beautifully in all resolutions (of course).
Understand that for todays article we dropped the 0xAA and 0x16 AF results from our scores completely .. it makes no sense to play games that way with this Crossfire setup, you enable 4xAA and 16xAF at minimum! We see the performance numbers close to 100 FPS at the highest resolutions, extremely playable up-to that 19x12 for all high-end cards. A marginal win for team Green though.
