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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 add 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. 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 Antialiasin 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 ShaderModel 3.0 and enable HDR rendering,
anti-aliasing will result in AA always be disabled.
However, with Shader Model 3 enabled we have plenty of other ways to really stress the card though.
- 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 though it can get for any graphics card, and the on-screen results are simply breathtaking. It is AMAZING how much difference the SLI setup makes. Of course for SLI we need to focus on the best possible settings versus highest resolutions to be able to witness how what exactly the setup can do. We see the performance almost double up with 100 frames per second.
When we have a look at HDR performance we see something quite nice, 1600x1200 + all the HQ settings as described above stil at 80 FPS !
Far Cry
If you haven't played the demo or the game, well shame on you! Far Cry's story centers on Jack Carver, who has put a mysterious past behind him in favor of a less stressful life chartering boats in the South Pacific... or so he thinks. After delivering a female journalist to an uncharted island, Jack's boat is attacked and he subsequently finds himself stranded against a group of mercenaries, at which point his adventure begins. Graphically Far Cry is amazing; the action takes place in a huge, brightly colored environment with dense jungle style shrubbery, peacefully quiet beaches and large indoor areas. The excellent shadow effects simply bring the game to life with reflections on walls and even on your own weapons as you creep through the trees. Its like something straight out of a movie, helped along by the lighting and tight, crisp textures.
For Far Cry we did things a bit different then normal. First off, the game has been patched to version 1.3. Secondly where possible we made sure that the graphics cards were forced to run Shader Model 3.0 if possible. Next to that we are using our own Guru3D.com constructed timedemo to prevent driver cheats.
The results (frames per second) that you see below are a lot lower then in normal conditions as we modified configuration settings and make it as rough as it can get on the graphics card. All in all, at this time and moment, this is one of the best tests we can offer you to benchmark DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards.
As you can see, not a huge lead here. I can explain, I've been telling you for many months now that this game is CPU limited, we need a faster CPU to make the GPU produce better scores. The are with 4x Antialiasing and 8 levels of Anisotropic filtering enabled.
With that being said, nice performance. We always go for the highest possible image quality during our tests. So our regular testing uses a personalized configuration file. The Far Cry scores you can see here are a little lower then you'll have at home, as we enable all possible graphics settings from the game engine. This goes for things like maximum texture sizes to looking at water and actually seeing sand banks underneath the water surface. So that's like the highest game setting available plus a few additions from our side and that does effect the framerate.
