Prey - X3 Reunion - Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

Our copy of Prey was a retail version of the game, and we benchmarked using HOCBench with the hwzone demo. We tested at 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 2560x1600 with 4x AA and 16 AF.

The 320 MB Gainward 8800 GTS, although overall performance is less than the 640 MB counterpart, ends up performing very similar to the 640 MB 8800 GTS. The margin of difference is further reduced at 2560x1600, resulting in only a 2.6 frame per second difference.

The Rolling Demo of X3 Reunion, which is freely distributed, comes with a built-in benchmarking utility which captures the core compnonents of the game. We tested at 1280x1024, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with 4x AA and 16x AF enabled.

For the most part the 320 MB 8800 GTS is able to perform similar to the 640 MB version, however, as the resolution is increased to 2560x1600 the performance drops significantly to 27.5 frames per second, 11 FPS less than the 640 MB 8800 GTS. Again, this drop can be accredited to the smaller amount of video memory.

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory was tested at resolutions of 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 2080x1536 with HDR enabled and anisotropic filtering set at 16x. Before testing , we applied the 1.05 patch and tested using the Lighthouse demo.

With HDR and anisotropic filtering both enabled we don't see much of a difference between the 320 MB and 640 MB card, and the Gainward 8800 GTS is actually faster at 2560x1600. This indicates that anti-aliasing enabled at high resolutions is usually the cause of a large performance penalty, but when disabled the bottleneck on the video card is effectively reduced resulting in higher performance at 2560x1600.