Splinter Cell and overclocking
Splinter Cell- Author: UbiSoft
- DirectX Class 8.1
- Pixel and Vertex Shaders: Yes (PS1.1)
- No FSAA. AF set via control panel
- Beyond3D Caspian Demo
Splinter Cell is benchmarked without the use of antialiasing. Even so, the benchmark still imposes significant difficulties for ATI's finest.
Overclocking
Overclocking serves at least two purposes. It adds, however incrementally, to the card's performance. It can also show, assuming enough samples have been tested, is just how much headroom there is in the GPU. AquaMark3, set to a taxing setting of 1600x1200 with 4x AF and 8x AF, was used to push the card. A final overclocked speed is indicative of the highest stable frequencies without artifact or any kind of corruption. Here's what we got to. Remember that the default clocks are 378MHz core and 700MHz memory, respectively.
An extra 10% for the GPU and 8% for the memory. Performance for free, literally. AquaMark3 and Call of Duty were retested at the savage settings.
Just enough oomph to nudge into first place.
We would have waxed lyrical if Crucial had bumped up the default clocks to 416/756, but why would you buy a Radeon 9800XT, then ?.