Page 16 - Splinter Cell

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 a nice set of Shaders. 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. You are looking at the score measured in an average framerate. 50 would equal 50 Frames per Second. The cards that have been tested are of course the GeForce 6600 GT, 6800 GT and even some SLI sessions can be found throughout the upcoming benchmarks. Next to that Radeon x800 XL, x850 XT and x850 XT PE are present in our test run. All that tested on an Athlon 4000+ PC with da PCX flavor.

Look at 1600x1200 where the CPU is not the bottleneck anymore. Amazing huh? It places the card directly where it should be.

Once we enable anisotropic filtering at 8 levels we see that this setting really isn't a big deal anymore. All other cards in this chart have been setup the same similar way.

My advice,

All the way to the right of the chart I also included the performance once we overclock the card. Small sidenote, the overclocking results through out all benchmark session are at default settings, thus no AA or AF enabled.

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.

When we have a look at HDR performance we see something quite nice. HDR always had a huge performance hit on the games. Let me place the results in an ordonary chart and run some calculations on them:

As you can see, we still used the high-quality settings and thus have amazing scores, yet flipped HDR on and off and then look at the percentual difference. Obviously the 7800 GTX can handle it rather nicely as the results is roughly 20% in performance. Sweet.