NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: XFX Style

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: XFX Style - Page 6
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, August 11, 2005, 08:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.03

Details: http://www.splintercell3.com/us/

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.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, XFX, force, fx, GT, 7800, 780, id

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com