Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory performance
Upcoming games will rely on increased shading to a greater degree. The GeForce 8600 GT's unified architecture and shader model 4.0 compliance will demand better-looking visuals through API enhancements by removing certain CPU compute constraints and by ushering in greater increased precision (quality), but its 32 superscalar stream processors, which, in the main, tackle the shading quotient, aren't able to put the largely vector-based (still a lot o' FLOPs) GeForce 7900 GS and Radeon X1950 Pro to shame.
Going off on a tangent for a moment, DX10 raises the bar for minimum quality by doing away with half-assed, make-up-your-own API compliance that DX9 GPU designers and games developers have sometimes gotten away with, but that doesn't make DX9 bad; it generally can look just as awesome, if not potentially as fast, as DX10. The biggest increase in image quality of these new GPUs will be, we reckon, down to their superior edge/texturing filtering algorithms, and those are largely API-agnostic.