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Unreal Tournament 2004

I've been meaning to get rid of this benchmark, but I haven't had much time to research some potential alternatives yet. This time around, however, it still serves to illustrate some vaguely-important differences: the 6800 Ultra sees a drop in performance at the highest resolution with AA/AF, while the 7800 GT keeps on going strong, performing identically to its big brother (remember, this benchmark is very CPU bound with the new generation of NVIDIA cards). The X850 suffers less of a drop than the 6800 Ultra, but it does not start equally. Remember, though, that the graph exaggerates these performance differences greatly due to its scale. While the X850 may appear dog slow here, it really is only an average of ~5-6 FPS behind the leaders.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Finally we come to the last benchmark in our series of tests. Splinter Cell is possibly the most interesting game currently in our series, as it takes advantage of some of the G70 architecture's new Shader Model 3.0 features. There are two graphs here -- the first illustrates Shader Model 1.1 results, which include the Radeon X850, while the second illustrates Shader Model 3.0 results, which the X850 does not support. A recent SC:CT patch enables the use of SM 2.0 on supported ATI cards, and we plan to make use of this with our next video card review.

Shader Model 1.1 results show us that all of the cards scale identically as the resolution increases. Both non-AA/AF and AA/AF sets of results show us that there is nothing particularly taxing about Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's SM 1.1 mode on any of our architectures. While the 7800 GTX places first, the 7800 GT is very close behind. The X850 even manages to match the 7800 GT almost point-for-point in the AA/AF tests. The 6800 Ultra keeps its distance.

Shader Model 3.0 performance scales almost identically to SM 1.1 performance, though everything is shifted down a few FPS. With the X850 no longer cluttering up the charts, we can see that the 7800 generation has a clear lead over the 6800 Ultra in this modern game, and also that the 7800 GTX's lead over the GT is negligible.

That concludes our regular testing! Those of you who are curious can look at the following two pages of SLI results, which contain only a select number of benchmarks. We will be publishing a full 7800 GT/GTX SLI review in the coming week, so sit tight for the full plate of results!