Page 9

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 as well, you'll definitely need it. Now this is where it can get confusing:

ANY graphics card that states AGP in it is what you should be focusing on the most.

the GeForce 6600GT 128MB AGP Reference is the reference model card from NVIDIA thatw e recently tested, the 6600GT 128MB Galaxy is of course the card we are testing today. All other cards are PCI-Express based and run (as explained) on a slightly faster Intel 915P based system with 3.6 Ghz Pentium 4.

When you see things like 4xAA 8xAF then we enabled some extra image quality settings like Anisotropic filtering and/or Antialiasing (AA). The only optimization at default enabled is Trilinear filtering for all graphics cards.

6600 256MB is a previously tested Galaxy card. x600 of course refers to the Radeon x600 we recently tested. 5750PCX is the GeForce PCI Express version of model 5700 and when you see 6600GT or 6800GT... well, you can guess.

Again, all cards in this review except the 6600 GT 128  MB AGP Reference and Galaxy we are testing today are PCI-Express graphics cards.