Asus EAX1650XT
8. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
A Japanese Information Defense Force is formed to help face modern threats. Deemed a violation of international law and of the Japanese Post-War Constitution, Korea and China become outraged.
Secretly, the head of the IDF begins launching information-warfare attacks against Japan and blaming the attacks on North Korea. When the U.S. intervenes, as they are obligated to under Article 9 of the Japanese Post-War Constitution, the U.S. is attacked as well, forcing North Korea to escalate the situation with a pre-emptive invasion of South Korea. As war erupts on the Korean Peninsula, Sam Fisher must thwart the alliance between the Japanese Admiral, a neurotic computer hacker, and the head of an international paramilitary company in order to prevent the rekindling of a massive world war in the Pacific.
The graphics engine supports Pixel Shader 1 and 3, HDR, along with other new effects. We used hocbench which offers all benchmarking options through an easy GUI. We used the built-in "Guru3D 2" timedemo and all results are posted below, using SM1.1
The Asus EAX1650XT was four FPS faster than the MSI 7600GT Silent. Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory also supports Shader Model 3.0 that can be easily enabled from within hocbench:
SM3.0 offers much better visual details and of course a performance hit. In this mode, the Asus EAX1650XT was only one FPS faster than the MSI 7600GT..
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory doesn't offer AA/AF modes, so we had to enable them from each VGA card's 3D Control panel.
Enabling AA/AF drops performance for all cards, almost... Both ATI based cards were very steady after enabling AA/AF. Again, the Asus EAX1650XT is equal to or faster than the MSI 7600GT.