Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B Radeon X1800XL
 |
|
;) 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. |
Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B = GeForce 7800 GT
Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B = Radeon X1800 XL
Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B = GeForce 7800 GT
Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B = Radeon X1800 XL
Splinter Cell : Chaos Theory follows the pattern originally seen with Halo; the NX78T256V-B maintains a lead over both Radeon-based cards at both resolutions, with or without any additional pixel processing. The difference between the cards is much more pronounced with AA enabled. Whereas the 7800GT lost but a few frames with AA enabled, the X850XT and X1800XL both dropped off in the range of 20-25%.
