Performance in Gaming Tests: Third-Person 3D Shooters

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

This graphically advanced game can please the eyes of the player with beautiful visuals if the graphics card supports Shader Model 3.0. It doesn’t however get any advantage from running on a mainboard with 16 PCI Express lanes connected to each of the graphics card slots. The game creates its visuals with pixel shaders and lacks complex textures, like all cross-platform projects do.

Note that the game runs at the same speed in the 8x and 16x SLI AA modes, so we suspect that 256 megabytes of graphics memory is not enough to correctly turn on 16x FSAA here. We can’t check this out as we don’t have two GeForce 7800 GTX 512 graphics cards at our disposal right now.