NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: XFX Style
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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, but it does not have shader model 2.0 path to fall back upon at the moment. So, when paired with the current generation of ATI's 3D hardware, Chaos Theory uses a shader model 1.1 code path (this is no longer the case when using the new v1.04 patch). For these tests we turned off High Dynamic Range rendering to somewhat level the playing field and 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. |
The GeForce 7800 GTX and GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI systems reigned supreme in the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark, but both of the GeForce 7800 GT configurations were nipping at their heals. The Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition also performed well here when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were enabled, actually beating the reference 7800 GT by a couple of frames per second at the higher resolution, but overall the GeForce 7800 GT is still the better choice because of its support for Shader Model 3.0 in this game, which gives it an edge in the image quality department.
