Asus Extreme N7800GTX Top - GeForce 7800 GTX
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Performance
Stepping things up a notch even further on the DX9 performance ladder, we have benchmarks for you with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. As you'll see in the scores ahead, it's even more demanding than Far Cry and just as graphically impressive.
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;) SC: Chaos Theory |
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory uses a heavily modified version of Epic's Unreal Engine, enhanced with a slew of DX9-class shaders, dynamic lighting, and mapping effects. This game produces some gorgeous imagery with its very immersive, albeit dark environments. We should note that the game engine has a shader model 3.0 code path that allows the GeForce 6 & 7 Series of cards to really shine, but it wasn't until the latest v1.04 patch was released that a shader model 2.0 path was added to take advantage of ATI's current hardware. (Note: Our testing was done with the v1.03 patch for this article. This will change in future articles.) For the test results listed below, we turned off HDR rendering and parallax mapping to somewhat level the playing field and benchmarked the game at resolutions of 1,280 x 1024 and 1,600 x 1,200, both with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. |
With Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory we see a similar picture to our Far Cry tests. The ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top is about 45% faster than any of the other older generation cards, and about 4-5% faster than the BFG GeForce 7800GTX OC overall. Additionally, our SLI-based scores show close to a 60% incremental performance advantage over a single 7800GTX card, with blistering frame rates that again hover around the 100 fps mark even with high levels of AA and Aniso Filtering at high resolution.
