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
A NVIDIA port guarantees good performance for the FX 5700 cards. 8x anisotropic filtering is used for the quality benchmarks. The FX 5950 Ultra and Radeon 9800XT both struggle in this benchmark. It's not a surprise that lower cards do.
Overclocking
An educated guess would presume precious little overclocking potential. The core is already at 500MHz and the memory, running at 1GHz, is essentially overclocked. Gainward makes no secret about about using selected 2.2ns RAM, which runs at around 910MHz natively. Already, then, it's overclocked and possibly overvolted. Overclocking tests were carried out with the card housed in a normal Lian Li PC60 case. No special cooling was directed at the card.
515MHz core and 1015MHz memory was about as far as the card would go without causing artifacts. Gainward's cutting it close. AquaMark3 and X² - The Threat were re-run at 1024x768x32 4x AA and 8x AF.
AquaMark3 first.
As expected, the small headroom potential doesn't do much for performance, and the Gainward still lags behind the Radeon 9800SE AIW.
Another largely insignificant increase. We still wonder at the merits of marrying 1GHz DDR2 memory to a 128-bit wide memory bus. Some very expensive RAM adorns the Gainward Golden Sample. It's even faster than the FX 5950 Ultra's, which runs at a paltry 950MHz in comparison.