Splinter Cell: Double Agent: A Performance Analysis
by Josh Venning on December 8, 2006 2:10 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Setting Expectations
Luckily, with Double Agent, we don't have a game like Oblivion on our hands that stresses current generation GPUs to their limit and beyond. However, the game is still fairly taxing on your graphics card with all the quality settings turned up, particularly at high resolutions. We found that ATI hardware ran the game a little better and without as many problems as NVIDIA gear, and this isn't a big surprise, considering the game was originally made for the Xbox 360. In fact, the game is apparently a direct transfer of software from the Xbox360 platform to the PC, which might account for a lot of the bugs and the clunky game interface.
It's no secret that Splinter Cell: Double Agent has some problems running, especially on NVIDIA hardware. We found that on our test system, the game would crash to the desktop often when just changing simple settings like HDR and antialiasing. We discovered that by changing these settings while the game resolution was set to 640x480 we were able to avoid the constant crashing, but the game still had to be restarted for some settings to take effect. Constantly restarting the game gets very tiresome because of the long intro/splash screen which cannot be bypassed. This coupled with the long load times (and unload times when quitting a game back to the main menu) is a frustrating aspect of the game menu. We also found that sometimes certain quality settings wouldn't take effect even after restarting the game and/or computer, but then would suddenly take effect when something like the game resolution was changed.
The game was much more stable on ATI hardware, with hardly any of the crashing we saw with the NVIDIA cards. We still had to restart the game and sometimes switch resolutions to get certain quality settings to change, though. Also, CrossFire setups seem to cause a lot of crashing, and on the off chance that the game would work for us with CrossFire enabled it did not improve performance over a single GPU. In fact, both SLI and CrossFire don't seem to be supported by the game at present, and they actually resulted in worse performance than a single card. The game also won't play on our X800 card, and we suspect there will be limited or no support for SM2.0 cards in this game.
Splinter Cell: Double Agent is based on Unreal Engine 2, but graphically it looks better than original UE2 games because Ubisoft added DX9 shaders to handle effects like dynamic shadows, HDR, and a few other items. In this way Ubisoft gives the game a much more current and exciting look despite the older engine. However, even though the graphics look good, they aren't nearly as advanced graphically as what we will see from titles based around Unreal Engine 3.
Luckily, with Double Agent, we don't have a game like Oblivion on our hands that stresses current generation GPUs to their limit and beyond. However, the game is still fairly taxing on your graphics card with all the quality settings turned up, particularly at high resolutions. We found that ATI hardware ran the game a little better and without as many problems as NVIDIA gear, and this isn't a big surprise, considering the game was originally made for the Xbox 360. In fact, the game is apparently a direct transfer of software from the Xbox360 platform to the PC, which might account for a lot of the bugs and the clunky game interface.
It's no secret that Splinter Cell: Double Agent has some problems running, especially on NVIDIA hardware. We found that on our test system, the game would crash to the desktop often when just changing simple settings like HDR and antialiasing. We discovered that by changing these settings while the game resolution was set to 640x480 we were able to avoid the constant crashing, but the game still had to be restarted for some settings to take effect. Constantly restarting the game gets very tiresome because of the long intro/splash screen which cannot be bypassed. This coupled with the long load times (and unload times when quitting a game back to the main menu) is a frustrating aspect of the game menu. We also found that sometimes certain quality settings wouldn't take effect even after restarting the game and/or computer, but then would suddenly take effect when something like the game resolution was changed.
The game was much more stable on ATI hardware, with hardly any of the crashing we saw with the NVIDIA cards. We still had to restart the game and sometimes switch resolutions to get certain quality settings to change, though. Also, CrossFire setups seem to cause a lot of crashing, and on the off chance that the game would work for us with CrossFire enabled it did not improve performance over a single GPU. In fact, both SLI and CrossFire don't seem to be supported by the game at present, and they actually resulted in worse performance than a single card. The game also won't play on our X800 card, and we suspect there will be limited or no support for SM2.0 cards in this game.
Splinter Cell: Double Agent is based on Unreal Engine 2, but graphically it looks better than original UE2 games because Ubisoft added DX9 shaders to handle effects like dynamic shadows, HDR, and a few other items. In this way Ubisoft gives the game a much more current and exciting look despite the older engine. However, even though the graphics look good, they aren't nearly as advanced graphically as what we will see from titles based around Unreal Engine 3.
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mpc7488 - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
Neverwinter Nights 2 would be my vote. From the reviews I've read and my experience, it's even more difficult to run than Oblivion (though it's not clear why, the graphics are not that great in most instances, though the lighting effects are phenominal).Centurin - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
Neverwinter Nights 2 has framerate problems because of the engine. I wouldn't really use it to benchmark future games. I still feel that Oblivion is the best benchmarks for graphics at this point.DukeN - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
Where are the 8800 series benchmarks?Josh Venning - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
As we mentioned in the article, the 8800 cards weren't rendering the game properly. The graphical errors with Double Agent on the 8800 GTS and GTX made the game basically impossible to play. That's why we didn't include numbers for these cards. Hopefully when a patch or driver update fixes this issue we can see how the game performs on the 8800 in the future.Jodiuh - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
97.44 on NV's site now...Splinter Cell: Double Agent Single Player has geometry corruption.
Jodiuh - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
^^ That's under issue resolved.PrinceGaz - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
The GeForce 6 series cards support SM3.0 so could you please add results for some representative cards of that generation. I would suggest a 6800GT (which usually performs in between a 7600GS and 7600GT so would probably belong in the 'mid-range' category) and a 6600GT (which I guess is somewhere around the 7300GT level or slightly higher and would therefore be considered 'low-end').I know the GF6 cards are getting on a bit now but there are a lot of people still using them as they are still capable of running most games quite well (especially the 6800s), and including them makes sense as owners of them are probably the most likely to be considering an upgrade which is what an article like this is presumably intended for.
imaheadcase - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
From the performance I'm assuming it looks better when playing, because that looks like a console game graphics. heheshabby - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
The only thing this article is missing is different cpu's, but let me fill that void. With a p4 @ 3.2 ghz + x1900xtx i get around 10-20fps avg. Luckily my e6400 just arrive and i will finally get some decent fps now since the p4 seems like a huge bottleneck.yyrkoon - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
Forcing paying customers to BETA test games, seems to be becoming a habit among developers, and is simply wrong. Anyone remember the BC 3000 A.D. days and what happened to Derrik Smart ? Anyhow, hoping that Bethesda made Oblivion into a game that would renew my days of playing Daggerfall, I purchased the game, and even stuck up for the developers when others criticized the bugs of the game. Days turned into weeks, then weeks into months, additional content was released (pay ware I might add), all before Bethesda finally released its beta patch. It soon dawned on me, that Bethesda no longer enjoyed creating games, or cared about making their customers happy, but only cared about making money, and that I couldn't help feeling ripped off.I do realize that game developers need to make money like anyone else, but they also need to realize that "anyone else" that works very hard for their money, when they do sell something, they need to provide a solid, working product. Could you imagine Ford, or another car manufacturer selling cars, as new, only to let the customer know AFTER they made the purchase, that some items still needed to be worked on, and that some assembly may be required ? We all know this wouldn't float for one second. After all, its not our fault the developer couldn't release a product on time, or needs money NOW to continue their product. Also, I find it rather strange, that a game recently released does not support new hardware, when games that have been out much longer do. Or did they ?
Companies such as this will find it very hard to get any of my money in the future, and I can only hope that other people will follow, and that perhaps someday we'll have game companies that actually release games as advertised once again. It's hard enough that we gamers have to live with games that are no longer as dynamic as they once were, and have to pay $50usd for game content that lasts about 5-8 hours, before you start reliving the game over, and over, until it finally ends.