Benchmarks - Splinter Cell (DirectX)

 Here we'll use our Splinter Cell Oil Refinery demo to assess the performance of Radeon X800's in this DirectX8 title.

With out Splinter Cell demo you can see that even at low resolution there is quite a difference between the X800 boards and the older Radeons – this tends to suggest that the title is actually Vertex Limited and the increased Vertex Shader performance of the X800 boards is providing quite a large boost to the over all rendering performance here. The gap between the X800 XT PE and the X800 PRO opens up as the resolutions scale so we can see that there is also some fill-rate limitations with this rather intensive level.

This is another instance where we can see a real-world, doubling of performance from one generation to the next with Radeon X800 XT PE providing twice the FPS of a 9800 XT, and remaining well above an average of 60 FPS in this demo. The X800 PRO also provides as much as a 57% performance increase over the 9800 XT thanks to its increased performance.

With 16X AF applied the situation is similar to normal rendering, in terms of relative performances, but the gaps from the new generation to the previous opens a little wider as applying high quality filtering requires more fill-rate, something which the newer boards have in abundance! 

Comparing the X800 XT PE performances we see that about 11% of the normal rendering performance is lost for enabling 16X AF. In both cases the average rendering performance is above 60 FPS.

Comparing the X800 PRO’s performances we see that in about 12% of the normal rendering performance is lost for enabling 16XAF, and we can see that there is a little more in the way of fill-rate limitations beyond 1024x768.