Leadtek 7800 GT and ForceWare 78.03

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Publisher: Ubisoft

We used the full version of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory patched to version 1.04. It features a new game engine that has been created around a heavily modified Unreal Engine 2 - the game used to only have two shader profiles: Shader Model 1.1 and Shader Model 3.0. All of ATI's current video cards default to Shader Model 1.1, and only the GeForce 6 series is capable of using the Shader Model 3.0 path.

However, the introduction of patch 1.04 bought a Shader Model 2.0 profile for ATI's current generation video cards. You can read more about the Shader Model 2.0 path here.

We configured both Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering from within the game, and thus the driver control panel was left set to "Application Controlled".

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 23 to 28 frames per second minimum and a target of 50 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate delivered a smooth and fluid gaming experience across the rest of the game.

We found that the new 'fixed' 78.03 driver did not result in us having to lower our best-playable settings in the same way that we had to with Battlefield 2. We saw very little change in performance in this title at all. The minimum frame rate remained the same, whilst the average frame rate creeped up by a single frame per second.

This shows that the driver bug that was found in ForceWare 77.77 did not affect this game and we're seeing the typical driver-by-driver performance improvements that one expects with newer, updated driver releases.