Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B 7800GT
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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 x8x0 hardware. 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 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200, both with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. |
With Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory we see that with the current generation of cards, Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering techniques no longer create as large of a performance drop as they had in the past. Sure, there is a definite drop-off in frame rates, but even the 6800GT is able to produce an almost playable 34.27fps at 1600x1200. More impressively, the NX78T256V-B at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/16X Aniso is outrunning both the NX6800GT and X850XT, when they are not using any additional pixel processing at all.
