Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory with SM2.0

Playability:

I guess the number one question on your mind at the moment is: 'Is it playable?'

I guess that comes down to what you would deem to be a playable frame rate. At 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF with just HDR turned on in the advanced shader options menu, we found that we were averaging around 32 frames per second over the course of the light house level. Hardly smooth, in our eyes.

We didn't have our normal benchmark system available to us at the time of testing, so we couldn't determine best-playable settings from our normal manual run through area. However, we did have best-playable settings for a GeForce 7800 GTX to give us a yard stick of what a playable frame rate would be on this particular level. Seeing as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is not particularly CPU limited, our AMD Athlon 64 3500+ should not make too much difference to the playable settings. We did a five minute manual run through from the start of the Light House level to where you find Bruce Morganholt's body.

The GeForce 7800 GTX returned a frame rate of a little under 65 frames per second average and a 35 frames per second minimum. With this yard stick, we found that the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition could attain a smooth frame rate at 1024x768 0xAA 8xAF with HDR, Parallax Mapping and Soft Shadows turned on.

Whether or not that is worth the trade of is a question you have to ask yourselves. However, we found that the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition was playable in this game with HDR turned off at 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF using the Shader Model 2.0 path. We believe that you really need a GeForce 7800 GTX or a dual card configuration to make use of HDR, as last generation's single card configurations were just not fast enough to utilise HDR at a reasonable resolution.

Final Thoughts...

It is good to see that ATI have worked with Ubisoft Montreal to bring HDR Rendering to Shader Model 2.0 hardware, and more importantly, create a Shader Model 2.0 path for all of those Radeon 9700/9800 and current generation owners who may feel like they have been alienated by the development community. However, what strikes us as interesting is that we have known that R520 will feature support for Shader Model 3.0 and be capable of floating point blending, as is required to utilise the HDR rendering methods that have thus far been created for NVIDIA's GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series for some time now.

Could it be that R520 is delayed even further than previously thought? Of course, ATI won't comment on that kind of speculation. However, at the company's end of quarter conference call that was held at the end of last month, CEO Dave Ortron stated that R520 is scheduled for a 'late summer' launch when questioned rather belligerently by analysts and share holders. So in retrospect, R520 will launch by the 22nd September - officially the last day of summer.

It is a stop gap for the time being. It's not a bad one, but it is clearly not quite as good as what is possible with a four channel 16-bit floating point blend. Typically ATI's drivers render scenes slightly darker than NVIDIA's, which can often mean that detail is omitted. Here we can see that there are some cases where the lighting just doesn't look quite as realistic. I'm sure you could argue that there are some cases where the lighting is more realistic, too.

The fact of the matter is that with a single channel 16-bit 'fixed' integer primary render target, you are limited to a smaller range of values for dynamic colour data. A four channel 16-bit floating point primary render target allows for a greater range of colours. You could say that the dynamic range of colours available to NVIDIA hardware utilising the four channel 16-bit floating point blend is potentially unlimited - a possible reason behind the more vibrant-looking lighting effects.

For those of you who want own ATI hardware and want to see the improvements for yourselves, you can download the patch from Splinter Cell's home page.