Splinter Cell

Here we'll use our Splinter Cell Oil Refinery demo to assess the performance of GeForce 6800 Ultra in this DirectX8 title. In this case the higher quality but lower performance "Buffer" shadows are enabled for these NVIDIA boards.

Splinter Cell (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
6800 Ultra 66.9 62.4 57.1 47.5 42.7
5950 Ultra 51.7 46.0 39.2 31.3 25.9
5900 Ultra 50.5 44.8 38.1 30.3 25.0
5800 Ultra 44.7 40.1 34.5 27.9 23.3
6800 Ultra % Difference 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
5950 Ultra 29.5% 35.7% 45.6% 51.7% 65.0%
5900 Ultra 32.4% 39.3% 49.8% 56.6% 71.0%
5800 Ultra 49.5% 55.7% 65.5% 70.3% 83.4%

Under our Splinter Cell test we can begin to see a fairly wide gap opening up between the 6800 Ultra and the 5950, with up to a 65% advantage to the 6800 Ultra. The fill-rate graphs for either board are not entirely flat, indicating that there are some system limited sections in there; however, the performance does drop off over the resolutions indicating either some fill-rate or bandwidth limitations. There is a performance difference at 640x480, which could indicate that this test is also slightly geometry limited and the higher performance geometry engine is helping out the performance of the 6800 Ultra.

It should be noted, however, that the Splinter Cell scores show here for the 5950 are lower than we have seen in previous driver revisions.

Splinter Cell - 8X AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
6800 Ultra 62.3 57.3 51.2 42.3 37.5
5950 Ultra 44.7 39.1 32.7 26.1 21.6
5900 Ultra 43.6 38.0 31.7 25.2 20.8
5800 Ultra 39.8 35.1 29.7 23.9 19.9
6800 Ultra % Difference 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
5950 Ultra 39.3% 46.5% 56.8% 61.7% 73.4%
5900 Ultra 42.9% 50.7% 61.8% 67.5% 80.1%
5800 Ultra 56.5% 63.2% 72.6% 77.1% 88.3%

With the lighting mechanism of the Splinter Cell engine not agreeing with Multi-Sampling FSAA, we'll only measure the performance here with 8X AF. As you can see, the trends displayed under normal rendering still apply here, though the performance gap between the two boards opens out a little further, to a maximum of 73%.

6800 Ultra (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
Normal 66.9 62.4 57.1 47.5 42.7
8X AF 62.3 57.3 51.2 42.3 37.5
% Diff from Normal 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
8X AF -6.8% -8.2% -10.2% -11.1% -12.3%

Comparing the performances of normal rendering and 8X AF rendering, we do see that 6800 Ultra has a performance hit, up to a worst case of 12%. At 1600x1200 with 8X AF the performance is still well above 30 FPS (which is no mean feat for this particular console port).