Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory still utilises the Unreal Engine, like its predecessors, however it has been significantly updated. Alongside a pixel shader 1.1 path, a Shader Model 3.0 path with additional options available with that a subsequent patch has been added to provide all the features of the SM3.0 path for SM2.0 boards. For more details of the rendering options and benchmarking using Splinter Cell Chaos Theory see our Benchmarking Guide here. The highest Shader profile available for each of the boards was utilised.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is a fairly demanding title, with all the single boards showing graphics limitations at high resolutions. In this instance the X1900 XTX has a 36% performance advantage over the X1800 XT at 1600x1200 by virtue of its greater fragment processing capabilities - the shader lengths in this title are actually some of the longer ones in terms of instructions to texture utilisation, hence the X1900 is able to process these elements faster.

Because all the boards are fairly graphics limited, the gains for Crossfire are fairly large as well. the X1900 Crossfire platform has a 27% performance advantage to X1800 Crossfire and gains over a single board in the order of 78% at high resolution, allowing an average performance over 100 FPS.

With 4x FSAA and 8x AF enabled, instead of HDR rendering, the performance difference between the X1900 and X1800 is a little reduced, due to it being a little more bandwidth limited as opposed to shader limited, but its still 30% at 1600x1200, with the XTX's average rendering performance above 90%. The Crossfire gains are again fairly large, with the X1900 Crossfire platform gaining up to 81% in relation to a single board.

With 6x FSAA and 16x AF the performances are going to be a little more bandwidth and texture bound again, hence the performance gain the X1900 XTX has over the X1800 XT is constrained a little more by these factors, but there is still a 28% performance difference due to the shader processing requirements of this title. Once again Crossfire is showing good performance scaling with the X1900 Crossfire system having an 83% performance gain over a single board.