Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within doesn’t support full-screen anti-aliasing, just like the Pariah game, because it uses some specific shader effects (Bloom). Although the game is pretty rich in textures, they are not that huge for the 256MB of onboard graphics memory to provide any significant performance advantages. Besides the textures, the game also uses a lot of not very complex pixel shaders that is why the overclocked ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer performs pretty well, although it doesn’t outpace the GeForce 6800. RADEON X1600 XT again suffers from some texturing problems (because of only 4 TMUs onboard) and from simple shader performance issues. Relatively raw drivers as well as inappropriate architectural optimizations are the ones to blame for shader performance issues.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
I can’t say that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory can boast a lot of large textures, because the performance in this game depends mostly on the ability of the graphics accelerator to process Shader Model 3.0 and normal maps. We may disregard the results of RADEON X800 GT and RADEPN X700 PRO here, because both of them support only Shader Model 2.0 and hence work in lighter conditions than the rest of the solutions supporting Shader Model 3.0. So, in this respect our ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer will be competing with GeForce 6800 and RADEON X1600 XT in the first place. The first one features 121 pixel processors, and the second one has its architecture optimized for Shader Model 3.0, so our today’s hero working at its nominal frequencies can hardly hope for success. When we overclocked it, the results turned out much better. In pure speed mode ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer takes the lead and later on stays at least as fast as GeForce 6800 even with enabled FSAA.