3D Performance with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Part 2 ATI Mainstream Cards April 14, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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So why are we only testing ATI cards today? Simple, NVIDIA’s only a few hours away from releasing newer ForceWare drivers. We were just wrapping up GeForce 6600 GT testing when we learned this. Rather than post results with an outdated driver, we figured it was better to just post the ATI results now, and write a follow-up article with the NVIDIA cards once we’ve had enough time to properly test the cards with the newer driver.

Testing changes

If you recall our first Chaos Theory article, hardware shadow mapping wasn’t available for RADEON X850/X800 XL cards, even though the hardware was capable of supporting this feature. As a result, we decided to turn it off for all cards.

Fortunately we can report that ATI was able to resolve this issue with the release of CATALYST 5.4 last week, so ATI users now have access to this performance-enhancing setting and you will want to turn it on (as we did in our testing). Unfortunately however, there’s still no support for 2.0 or 2.0b shaders, and based on all indications these shaders won’t be added by Ubisoft anytime in the near future, if ever. Instead Ubisoft is likely hard at work on preparing Splinter Cell 4 for Microsoft’s upcoming next-generation Xbox console.

Another change we’ve made in our testing is turning down the shadow resolution from high quality shadows to medium quality. We ran a few quick tests with the RADEON X800 XL to show the performance difference:










As you can see, turning down just the shadow quality can have a significant impact on performance; at 1024x768 with AA and AF disabled, performance improves by 15%, with a 10% improvement under 4xAA/8xAF at the same resolution. The performance benefits are even more significant on lower-end cards.

The final change we made is in our demo used for testing. Whereas in our first article we relied on the stock demo that ships with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, from now on we’re going to use custom demos.

Test Systems

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System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 4000+

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe

1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2

ATI RADEON X800 XL
ASUS RADEON X800 256MB
ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256MB
Sapphire TOXIC X700 PRO 128MB (ACE Disabled)
Driver version CAT 5.4

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory 1.1

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

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Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Direct3D

Chaos Theory Performance 1024x768
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
RADEON X800 XL	49.3	242.5
RADEON X800 256MB	24.9	231.5
RADEON X700 PRO 256MB	19.8	193.9
RADEON X700 PRO 128MB	19.5	193.3

Chaos Theory 2xAA

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Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Direct3D

Chaos Theory Performance 1024x768
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
RADEON X800 XL	25.6	239.7
RADEON X800 256MB	20.6	156.5
RADEON X700 PRO 256MB	17.2	133.9
RADEON X700 PRO 128MB	17.5	133.1

2xAA/8xAF

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Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Direct3D

Chaos Theory Performance 1024x768
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
RADEON X800 XL	25.3	238.5
RADEON X800 256MB	20.5	157.6
RADEON X700 PRO 256MB	17.4	134.5
RADEON X700 PRO 128MB	18	136

Splinter Cell 4xAA

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Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Direct3D

Chaos Theory Performance 1024x768
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
RADEON X800 XL	19	214.2
RADEON X800 256MB	17	154.2
RADEON X700 PRO 256MB	15.3	122.3
RADEON X700 PRO 128MB	15.3	122

4xAA/8xAF

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Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Direct3D

Chaos Theory Performance 1024x768
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
RADEON X800 XL	19.8	215.4
RADEON X800 256MB	17.4	155.1
RADEON X700 PRO 256MB	13.9	122.7
RADEON X700 PRO 128MB	13.8	123

Conclusion

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Just look at what you’re getting. The least expensive card in this roundup, the RADEON X700 PRO 128MB, typically sells for around $150 online. The X700 PRO 128MB is by no means a slouch in terms of performance, after all in previous testing we’ve found that the X700 PRO delivers performance similar to ATI’s previous high-end offering, the RADEON 9800 PRO, but in our testing with Chaos Theory the RADEON X800 XL consistently delivers nearly twice the performance of the X700 PRO 128MB in our high resolution tests. With this in mind, it’s hard not to be impressed by ATI’s RADEON X800 XL. NVIDIA still doesn’t have an answer for this card.

Based on today’s results, it’s hard to justify the 256MB RADEON X800. These boards typically sell for about $250 online, just $40-$50 below current X800 XL street prices. With the X800 XL delivering over 30% more performance than the X800 in many cases, spending the extra money for an XL board is a no-brainer. In light of this, a more appropriate price for the X800 256MB would probably be somewhere in the $220 range, but ATI’s pricing on these cards has remained unchanged.

The X700 PRO 128MB at $150 is a great deal, but we’re reserving final comments on this price segment until we’ve had a chance to evaluate the performance of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT with the upcoming ForceWare driver. The GeForce 6600 GT has proven to be a tough competitor to the X700 PRO, with prices in the $170-$200 range. Considering Ubisoft’s decision to provide exclusive features to the GeForce 6 series only, the X700 could have a tough time here.

So there you have it, an early look of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory performance with today’s mainstream graphics offerings. We’ll be taking a look at NVIDIA’s mainstream solutions as soon as we get our hands on NVIDIA’s upcoming ForceWare driver release. Word is the new driver will be online in a matter of hours, but you never truly know with these types of things. We’ve got our fingers crossed…