ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05
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;) SC: Chaos Theory |
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, and the new X1000 family of cards, to really shine, and a recent patch has implemented a shader model 2.0 path for ATI's X8x0 generation of graphics hardware. For these tests we enabled the SM 3.0 path on all of the cards we tested. However, High Dynamic Range rendering was disabled so that we could test the game with anti-aliasing enabled (a future patch should enable AA with HDR on the X1K family). 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. |
NVIDIA's 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX was dominant in this benchmark before today, but ATI's new Radeon X1900 XTX reclaims the overall performance lead in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Both the X1900 XT and X1900 XTX were able to outpace the GeForce 7800 GTX, by margins ranging from about 4% to 10% depending on the test configuration, and X1900 CrossFire was faster than a pair of 7800 GTX 512s running in SLI mode as well. Framerates were competitive when no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering was used but with AA and Aniso, ATI had a more pronounced advantage.
