Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - HDR

As we did with Far Cry we'll look at the performance of our Splinter Cell test with its HDR mode enabled as well.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - HDR (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 118.5 105.7 81.3 57.2 42.4
6800 Ultra 97.2 77.4 57.9 39.8 29.3
7800 GTX SLI 118.8 118.9 117.6 102.6 80.3
6800 Ultra SLI 117.5 115.2 99.2 71.4 52.4
7800 GTX % Faster than 6800 Ultra 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
Single 21.9% 36.5% 40.4% 44.0% 45.1%
SLI 1.1% 3.3% 18.5% 43.7% 53.3%
% SLI Increase 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 0.2% 12.5% 44.6% 79.3% 89.2%
6800 Ultra 20.8% 48.8% 71.4% 79.6% 79.0%

As we saw without HDR, the 7800 GTX is able to offer a performance increase over the 6800 Ultra, to the tune of 45% at high resolution for just one board and 53% in SLI more. Its interesting to note that Splinter Cell doesn't suffer the same types of issues with HDR in SLI mode as Far Cry does, however we suspect that this may be because the two titles are using different SLI rendering modes.

As this title is quite graphics bound even under normal rendering, we can compare the Normal and HDR rendering scores to see what types of a performance hit the two boards have when enabling it:

Performance difference between Normal and HDR 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX -5.3% -11.5% -18.4% -22.9% -22.7%
6800 Ultra -14.6% -18.8% -20.3% -23.7% -24.0%
7800 GTX SLI -2.4% -2.7% -3.5% -11.9% -20.4%
6800 Ultra SLI -2.7% -4.8% -12.8% -21.9% -23.2%

As we can see the performance drop from Normal to HDR rendering is fairly similar on board boards, at the higher resolutions, with the 7800 GTX only displaying about 1% less performance drop. However, the higher the resolution the more shader bound the application is, and we can see at the lower resolutions there is actually a a smaller performance drop for the 7800 GTX than the 6800 Ultra which may give indications that HDR rendering, when not bound by the pixel shader performance, is improved.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - HDR, 8x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 117.9 104.2 79.8 56.2 41.7
6800 Ultra 94.0 74.5 55.6 38.3 28.3
7800 GTX SLI 118.8 118.9 117.3 101.6 79.1
6800 Ultra SLI 117.3 113.9 96.2 69.0 50.7
7800 GTX % Faster than 6800 Ultra 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
Single 25.4% 40.0% 43.5% 46.9% 47.6%
SLI 1.3% 4.4% 22.0% 47.2% 55.9%
% SLI Increase 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 0.8% 14.1% 47.0% 80.7% 89.5%
6800 Ultra 24.8% 53.0% 73.0% 80.3% 79.4%

With just 8x AF enabled the performance difference between the boards and their various configurations are similar to the scores under normal rendering, however the 7800 GTX does have an extra few percent performance difference, probably due to its higher texturing capabilities.