Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

The new card from Nvidia suddenly loses to the ex-flagship GeForce 7950 GX2. The game abounds in special effects that involve doing a lot of math1 and this should match the GeForce 8800 GTX with its huge computing power perfectly, so the only explanation we can think of is that its driver has not yet been thoroughly optimized.

It’s somewhat better for the GeForce 8800 GTX in 8x FSAA mode, yet its performance is still far from what we might expect. The card is slower than the single Radeon X1950 XTX in every resolution and the gap is growing wider in higher resolutions. We should make allowances for the GeForce 8800 GTX doing 8x MSAA, which is more resource-consuming than the Radeon X1950 XTX’s 6x MSAA, yet the defeat of the Nvidia card looks strange and surprising anyway.

The GeForce 8800 GTX can’t win in the most extreme antialiasing mode, either, but it is at least ahead of the GeForce 7950 Quad SLI and delivers comfortable performance in resolutions up to 1600x1200.