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Splinter CellFirst 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.

As always we'll start of 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:

When you see things like 4xAA and/or 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. The rest is disabled by registry tweaks.

6600GT 128MB Inno3D is our default test result (Trilinear filtering, no AA), this is the result you need to look at when comparing to the other graphics cards!

6600GT 128MB Inno3D OC means the card was overclocked to 550 MHz for the core and 1.2 GHz for its memory!

6600GT 128 MB is a Gigabyte card tested last week. This is the card you should be comparing to.

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.

All cards in this review are PCI-Express graphics cards.

Keep in mind, the higher a graphics card will go in resolution, the harder it'll be for it to render decent framerates.