Splinter Cell: Double Agent: A Performance Analysis
by Josh Venning on December 8, 2006 2:10 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
High-End Cards
Certain things jumped out as soon as we started benchmarking Splinter Cell: Double Agent. In particular, aside from running with less bugs and glitches, the game performed much better on ATI hardware than NVIDIA hardware in all of our tests. Almost all of our ATI cards were able to run the game with fairly playable frame rates at the highest resolution, with the highest quality settings. As a testing side note, we also noticed that ATI saw frame rates that were more consistent than NVIDIA's between multiple runs of the same benchmark and settings. For all the NVIDIA cards, when running a benchmark twice, there was an improvement in performance of 1-2 fps, while with ATI the difference was only a fraction of an fps.
For the performance tests, we divided the test resolutions into three sections for NVIDIA and ATI based on the three levels of hardware: low-end, mid-range, and high end performance. For the lower-end cards, we tested at 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 resolutions. For mid-range cards, we tested at 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 resolutions. On high end cards, we tested at the three highest resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. In this way we were able to see some performance overlaps between tests with each of the different types of cards.
Here we see right away the difference in performance between ATI and NVIDIA hardware with Double Agent. ATI's X1950 XTX gets the highest performance of the group, and could have handled much higher resolutions had they been available. The X1950 XTX even sees a little bit of CPU limitation between these resolutions, because of its high level of performance with this game. NVIDIA's 7900 GTX gets similar performance to the X1900 XT 256, and the 7950 GT similar to the X1950 Pro.
For the more stressful cruise ship benchmark, we can see how much performance impact a highly detailed area can have in this game. The cruise ship level is one of the more graphically intensive levels of the game, and this is one of the places where your hardware will really make a difference in gameplay. The 7900 GS manages to run this benchmark smoothly at 1280x1024, but if you want to play the game at 1600x1200 you will have more flexibility with ATI hardware. The performance difference, coupled with the smoother operation and fewer crashes, make ATI hardware a much better solution for running this game than NVIDIA.
Certain things jumped out as soon as we started benchmarking Splinter Cell: Double Agent. In particular, aside from running with less bugs and glitches, the game performed much better on ATI hardware than NVIDIA hardware in all of our tests. Almost all of our ATI cards were able to run the game with fairly playable frame rates at the highest resolution, with the highest quality settings. As a testing side note, we also noticed that ATI saw frame rates that were more consistent than NVIDIA's between multiple runs of the same benchmark and settings. For all the NVIDIA cards, when running a benchmark twice, there was an improvement in performance of 1-2 fps, while with ATI the difference was only a fraction of an fps.
For the performance tests, we divided the test resolutions into three sections for NVIDIA and ATI based on the three levels of hardware: low-end, mid-range, and high end performance. For the lower-end cards, we tested at 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 resolutions. For mid-range cards, we tested at 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 resolutions. On high end cards, we tested at the three highest resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. In this way we were able to see some performance overlaps between tests with each of the different types of cards.
Here we see right away the difference in performance between ATI and NVIDIA hardware with Double Agent. ATI's X1950 XTX gets the highest performance of the group, and could have handled much higher resolutions had they been available. The X1950 XTX even sees a little bit of CPU limitation between these resolutions, because of its high level of performance with this game. NVIDIA's 7900 GTX gets similar performance to the X1900 XT 256, and the 7950 GT similar to the X1950 Pro.
For the more stressful cruise ship benchmark, we can see how much performance impact a highly detailed area can have in this game. The cruise ship level is one of the more graphically intensive levels of the game, and this is one of the places where your hardware will really make a difference in gameplay. The 7900 GS manages to run this benchmark smoothly at 1280x1024, but if you want to play the game at 1600x1200 you will have more flexibility with ATI hardware. The performance difference, coupled with the smoother operation and fewer crashes, make ATI hardware a much better solution for running this game than NVIDIA.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
28 Comments
View All Comments
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.