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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 1920x1200 we see a 72 FPS framerate for the high-end 7900 GTX. And even the 7600 GT "could" play this game with these IQ settings.  Let's make the cards sweat a little and enable some more lovin, HDR and 16 levels of Anisotropic filtering.

These complex settings really are a tough nut to crack for most graphics cards. We measured with 16 levels of AF enabled and had HDR is activated. With such settings you can stick at 1920x1200 with the 7900 GT and GTX. Sheesh, look at that brute horsepower. Impressive for sure. The 7600 GT drops back to 1280x1024 with a very acceptable framerate. You'll notice that the 7600 GT has an almost 30-50% performance increase over last years mid-range products.