Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Performance

We make use of the Lighthouse demo for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. We have been using this benchmark for quite some time and facilitate automation with the scripts published at Beyond 3D. This benchmark is fairly close to in game performance for our system, but midrange users may see a little lower real world performance when tested with a lower speed processor.

Our settings all used the highest quality level possible including the extra SM3.0 features. As the advanced shaders and antialiasing are mutually exclusive under SC:CT, we left AA disabled and focused on the former. We set anisotropic filtering to 8x for all cards.

For this 3rd person stealth game, ultra high frame rates are not necessary. We have a good playing experience at 25 fps or higher. There may be the framerate junkie out there who likes it a little higher, but our recommendation is based on consistency of experience and ability to play the game without a degraded experience.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

NVIDIA's 7900 GTX SLI does almost as well as X1900 CrossFire, but the 14% advantage X1950 CF has over X1900 CF puts it way out in front. The 7950 GX2 once again splits the difference between the X1950 XTX and the 7900 GTX SLI.

While X1950 XTX leads all the single-GPU single-card solutions, there really isn't that much difference between the playability of the X1900 XTX, 7900 GTX, and X1900 XT. The extra 256MB of RAM the original X1900 XT has does give it a 7.5% advantage over it's baby brother at this resolution.

ATI leads again in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, both in dual-GPU and single-GPU configurations. Here the GX2 occupies a nice middle ground, and all of the tested cards manage to remain playable up through 2048x1536. Using the "Chuck Patch" it is also possible to enable AA+HDR on ATI hardware, though time constraints and the fact that there is no NVIDIA equivalent caused us to skip this test for now.

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  • TigerFlash - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link

    I suppose I worded that the opposite way. Do you think Intel will stop supporting Crossfire cards?
  • michal1980 - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link

    Can we not even get any numbers for cards below the 7900GTX.

    I understand your limited, but how about some numbers from some cards below that, to see what an upgrade would do.

    I know we can kind of take test from old reviews of the cards, but your test bed has changed since core 2, so its not a fair heads to heads test of old numbers to new.

    it would be nice to see if theres a point(wise or not) to upgrade from a 7800gt or that gen of cards, or something slower like a 7900gt.

    but it seems like ever 'new gen' card test just drops off 'older' cards
  • michal1980 - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link

    what i meant is that on the tables, or where all the new cards are, it would be nice to have some numbers for old cards.
  • Lifted - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link

    Agreed. I'm still running a 6800GT and have not seen much of a reason to upgrade with the current software I run. Perhaps if I saw that newer games are 3x faster I might consider an upgrade, so how about it?

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