Thanks to Newegg for supplying the Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB for testing.

Splinter Cell

We have a recorded demo on "The Caspian Oil Refinery" map which is much more dependent on the graphics card than the CPU. Splinter Cell uses a shadow algorithm that takes into account the number of AI bots in the scene. In this demo, there is only one enemy towards the end, reducing the dependency on the CPU. The ocean's surface, as well as the night vision goggles, use pixel shaders which also help add additional load to the graphics card. The demo is played back as a timedemo, rendering the frames as fast as possible and spitting out the average FPS. You may download the timedemo here.

Splinter Cell does not support Anti-Aliasing and it was disabled during benchmarking. Anisotropic filtering was set to 8x for all of the Splinter Cell tests. For each test, the time-demo was run three times and the results were averaged.

Splinter Cell (NoAA/NoAF)
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640x480

800x600

1024x768

1280x1024

1600x1200

PowerColor X600 XT 128MB

Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB

Leadtek 6600 GT 128MB

43.96

51.94

65.16

0

(FPS)

100

 

 

640x480

800x600

1024x768

1280x1024

1600x1200

PowerColor X600 XT 128MB

Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB

Leadtek 6600 GT 128MB

38.93

46.54

58.18

0

(FPS)

100

 

 

640x480

800x600

1024x768

1280x1024

1600x1200

PowerColor X600 XT 128MB

Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB

Leadtek 6600 GT 128MB

33.51

41.05

50.97

0

(FPS)

100

 

 

640x480

800x600

1024x768

1280x1024

1600x1200

PowerColor X600 XT 128MB

Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB

Leadtek 6600 GT 128MB

26.79

32.65

38.82

0

(FPS)

100

 

 

640x480

800x600

1024x768

1280x1024

1600x1200

PowerColor X600 XT 128MB

Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB

Leadtek 6600 GT 128MB

21.68

27.74

33.43

0

(FPS)

100

 

 

Without AA or AF the X600 XT performs alright at up to 1024x768, and only up to 800x600 with NoAA/8xAF. The 6600 GT takes the lead in every single run, producing playable framerates all the way up to 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF, though barely playable at highest settings.