MSI GeForce 8800 GTX (NX8800GTX-T2D768E)
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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 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, both with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. |
Overall, the MSI 8800 GTX outperforms the 7950 GX2, but the margin is more or less underwhelming. A more powerful processor, such as a high-end Core 2 Duo, would likely provide different results. We would expect the 8800 GTX to edge out the 7950 GX2 by a larger margin.