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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 

This is as tough as it can get for any graphics card, and the on-screen results are simply breathtaking. Even at 1600x1200 we see a 35 FPS framerate for the 7600 GS. Let's make the cards sweat a little and enable some more lovin, HDR and 16 levels of Anisotropic filtering.

This really is a tough nut to crack for most cards, in fact I did not expect a 110 USD product to perform at all with these settings. We measured performance with 16 levels of AF enabled and had HDR is activated. With such settings you must stick at .... 1024x768. Still that is good value for money for a product in this price segment.

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 Quake 4 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 you can download from our download sections. The game here has no image quality settings like AA and AF enabled, you are looking at the results Trilinear filtered. Furthermore Quake is configured at the best possible settings, everything is maxed out and enabled.

Anyway, not a surprise but the card performs beautifully up-to 1920x1200 ! Quake 4 uses the Doom 3 engine and NVIDIA cards simply love it. A good 49 FPS at 1920x1200 for the Galaxy 7300 GT !

Interesting stuff happens when we enable 4xAA and 8 levels of anisotropic filtering we see the performance fall drastically in higher resolutions, the GT however works wonders as at 1600x1200 you can still achieve a 37 FPS framerate.