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We continued our
testing with Ubi Soft's Splinter Cell, using the Oil Rig
demo created by the folks at
Beyond 3D.
This is another test that is heavily dependant on Pixel
Shader performance. Pixel shaders are used in this demo to
render realistic looking ocean water surrounding an Oil Rig.
As we've mentioned in the past, antialiasing doesn't work
with the current version of Splinter cell, so we do not have
any AA scores listed for you in the graphs below...
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Benchmarks
With Splinter Cell |
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This is One Nice Looking Shooter |
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Gun Metal and
Splinter Cell tell basically the same story, with one
notable difference. The
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro again fell just shy of the Gigabyte 9800
Pro, while the Sapphire 9600 Pro nudged a tiny bit ahead of
the ATi built 9600 Pro. Once again, the performance
deltas are so miniscule they are virtually meaningless.
For all intents and purposes, these scores are identical.
It was interesting to see how much the Radeon 9600 Pro
struggled in our first two tests, however. The Radeon
9600 Pro is a great mainstream product, but it sure did take
a pounding in Gun Metal and Splinter Cell. The FX 5900
pulled ahead of the 9600 Pros, but it was dominated by the
9800 Pros.
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Head-to-Head Performance
With
Comanche 4 |
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Semper Fi or Die! |
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Next up, we have
some benchmark scores using Novalogic's combat helicopter
simulator Comanche 4. This game uses DirectX 8 class pixel
and vertex shaders in the production of the realistic
visuals used throughout the game. Unlike Gun Metal and
Splinter Cell, this benchmark is heavily influenced by CPU
and system memory performance, especially at lower
resolutions. If anti-aliasing and anisotropic
filtering are enabled at higher resolutions, however, the
video card also becomes a limiting factor.
With
antialiasing disabled at 1024x768, all of the cards
performed at very similar levels. When we enabled
antialiasing and anisotropic filtering at 1024x768, the
Radeon 9800 Pros paid a relatively small performance penalty
when compared to the 9600 Pros. We saw the same
scenario at 1600x1200. The much more powerful 9800
Pros flexed their muscles, while the 9600 Pros faltered a
bit.
UT2003 & Quake 3 Are Up Next
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