ATI CrossFire Technology Showcase
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;) SC: Chaos Theory |
We've recently added Ubisoft's great new game, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, to our suite of game benchmarks. Based on a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine, enhanced with a slew of DX9 shaders, lighting and mapping effects, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is gorgeous with its very immersive, albeit dark environment. The game engine has a shader model 3.0 code path that allows the GeForce 6 & 7 Series of cards to really shine, and a recent patch has implemented a shader model 2.0 path for ATI's current generation of graphics hardware. For these tests we enabled the SM 3.0 path on the GeForce cards and the SM 2.0 path for the Radeons. High Dynamic Range rendering was disabled, and we 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. |
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory showed very large performance increases by enabling CrossFire with a pair of Radeon X850 XTs (Master / Slave). At 1280x1024, enabling CrossFire resulted in 90% and 94% performance increases, without and with anti-aliasing enabled. The same held true at the higher resolution as well. With Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory running at a resolution of 1600x1200, the CrossFire configuration out-ran a single Radeon X850 XT by 96% when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were disabled, and by 98% when the extra pixel processing was enabled. And overall, once again, only the GeForce 7800 GTX SLI system was able to outperform the CrossFire rig.
