Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

It’s strange, but the PowerColor X1900 GT isn’t superior to the Radeon X1800 XL and GeForce 7900 GT in SC: Chaos Theory which uses math1ematics-heavy shaders in its visual effects. The cards show similar speeds, although the PowerColor is just a little faster than the other two in 1600x1200. Judging by the results of the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB, the reason is that the game doesn’t need many shaders to be processed in parallel, but needs a high speed of execution of a rather small number of them, which depends directly on the GPU clock rate.

When overclocked, the PowerColor is quite successfully competing with the GeForce 7900 GT despite having two times less of texturing-related subunits. There’s nothing surprising in this. The game was ported from video consoles and doesn’t have complex high-resolution textures, focusing on shader-based special effects instead. The Radeon X1900 GT delivers a comfortable performance in 1600x1200 with enabled full-screen antialiasing. We want to remind you that the requirements to minimum and average speeds are less strict for a third-person shooter than for a first-person one in which your shooting accuracy depends on the smoothness of play.