ATI Radeon X1900 Series Preview
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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Jan. 24, 2006
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Benchmarks - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is a little different than the rest of our benchmarks. The game supports SM 1.1, SM2.0 and SM 3.0. With SM 2.0 and 3.0 you have the choice to enable some new visual effects, perhaps most notably, HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting. Of course, turning these effects on will greatly impact your performance. Whereas in the past we had to alternate between using SM 2.0 and SM 3.0 for the ATI and NVIDIA cards respectively, we can now run SM3.0 with both companies' cards. As you will see below, we have tested each of the cards with and without all of the extra features available with SM3.0. I will refer to SM 3.0 with the extras turned on as SM 3.0+.
The timedemo we used was the one included with the game, and we used a batch file to run the timedemo three times at each setting.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory @ 1024 x 768 (SM3.0)
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No AA / No AF |
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4x AA / 8x AF |
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XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
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No AA / No AF |
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4x AA / 8x AF |
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ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory @ 1024 x 768 (SM3.0+)
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(Collapse Graphs)
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No AA / No AF |
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4x AA / 8x AF |
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ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
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No AA / No AF |
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4x AA / 8x AF |
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ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory @ 2048 x 1536 (SM3.0)
(Show All Graphs)
(Collapse Graphs)
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No AA / No AF |
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4x AA / 8x AF |
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ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
 |
No AA / No AF |
  |
4x AA / 8x AF |
 |
ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory @ 2048 x 1536 (SM3.0+)
(Show All Graphs)
(Collapse Graphs)
 |
No AA / No AF |
  |
4x AA / 8x AF |
 |
ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
 |
No AA / No AF |
  |
4x AA / 8x AF |
 |
ATI X1900 XTX 512 MB
ATI X1800 XT 512 MB
ATI X850 XT PE 256 MB
XFX 7800 GTX 256 MB
XFX 6800 GT 256 MB
At 1024x768 with SM3.0 the X1900 XTX, X1800 XT and the 7800 GTX are nose to nose at first, but as soon as you crank up the AA and AF the X1900 XTX has a 20fps advantage and the X1800 XT is close behind. When we move on to 1024x768 with SM3.0+ the X1900 XTX really starts to pull ahead of the pack. With NoAA/NoAF the X1800 XT and 7800 GTX are both 13fps slower, but when you move up to 4xAA/8xAF the X1900 XTX breaks away a little further (11fps from the X1800 XT, but 17fps from the 7800 GTX).
At 2048x1536 with SM3.0 all the cards perform surprisingly well. With SM3.0+ though, the X1900 XTX is the only one that can hope to get the job done with a reasonable framerate. Some of the performance advantage when SM3.0+ is turned on is very likely attributed to one of the new features of the X1900 XTX, Fetch4.
We'd like to thank Directron.com for donating the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 Motherboard which we used for testing.
1 - Posted by
J2T
on May 31, 2007 - 5:53 am
2 - Posted by
Kurtis
on May 31, 2007 - 12:17 pm
i'm sure there was a spam post, then the spam was deleted, leaving a bumped thread. =]
3 - Posted by
J2T
on June 1, 2007 - 6:07 pm
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