NVIDIA's GeForce 7 Update: Introducing the 7900 GTX, 7900 GT & 7600 GT
Splinter Cell: CT - GeForce 7900 Series
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;) SC: Chaos Theory |
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 1,280 x 1024 and 1,600 x 1,200, both with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. |
Performance was a mixed bag in the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark. At a resolution of 1280x1024, the GeForce 7900 GTX put up the highest scores in every test configuration, followed closely behind by the Radon X1900 XTX. The GeForce 7900 GT continues to perform very well, besting the 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX. At the higher resolution though, the Radeon X1900 XTX was able to comeback, and outpace NVIDIA's newest flagship by a couple of frames per second. Clearly, performance between each company's top of the line product up to this point is quite similar, which bodes very well for NVIDIA considering their chip is much smaller and less expensive to manufacture.
