Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell Benchmark Results

Splinter Cell is a very slow-paced game which places a great emphasis on slowly sneaking around in the dark. As such, when running the timedemo, I elected to keep the Shadow Level setting at high, as Splinter Cell wouldn't be the same game without the sweet and important shadow effects. Shadow Mode was left at the Buffer setting, which is the default setting for the GeForce class of cards and is the recommended setting by Ubisoft. The settings I modified for the various tests are the Shadow Resolution and Effects Quality settings. The Shadow Resolution setting was set at High for the first two rounds of testing then lowered to Medium for the last maps. The Effects Quality setting varied from Very High to Medium.

Since Splinter Cell's focus is slow and quiet spying over the all-out-action we're accustomed to seeing in the first person shooter genre, the game's performance is considered playable at much lower FPS than is typically considered acceptable for smooth performance when playing first-person shooters. The first three maps have similar performance results which allows the game to be smooth in most circumstances at 800x600 with the High/Very High settings for Shadow Resolution and Effects Quality. The Beyond3D Caspian Oil demo takes it's toll on the card as the level truly stresses the pixel shader paths of the card.

Tron 2.0 Demo - High Detail

Tron 2.0 Demo - Medium Detail

Tron 2.0 Demo Benchmark Results

The first of the games covered using FRAPS to measure the in-game performance is the Tron 2.0 Demo. A very cool little game with an extremely unique art concept wherein the characters and levels are composed solely of various shades of black and illuminescent borders. The High Detail picture above displays how truly illuminescent the borders can be. The overall effects is extremely cool and brings much more to the setting of the game than the rather drab textures in the Medium Detail setting. I wouldn't even consider playing the game at any setting other than the High Detail setting. Doing so wouldn't do justice to the game and all the cool glowing effects provided by the Lithtech engine.

Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII Demo

Being one of the most popular online games at the moment, performance numbers from Battlefield 1942 couldn't be overlooked. I tested the recent Secret Weapons of WWII demo as I've been hooked on it since it was released a few weeks ago. Testing the performance was a tad different than other games where I'd just let FRAPS count the frames and post the average. There's a couple reasons for this: 1 - The performance of the game when waiting to spawn was a tad different than in-game performance 2 - I was waiting to respawn quite often. ;) Therefore I would activate FRAPS' framerate logging system when I would respawn, try to do some damage and then deactivate it the moment I would be killed. After about an hour of playing I had a huge list of scores with the average framerate being right up around 50 FPS at 800x600. Very acceptable performance for a relatively low-priced card in a game that was reputed to be resource heavy at launch.

F1 Challenge '99-'02

F1 Challenge '99 - '02 is a fairly uncommon game to be included in the review. I burned so much time into this game, that neglecting all that would be quite a waste (not to mention featuring a racing game is a nice change of pace from all the first person shooters so dominant in video card reviews). I'm a great high-speed driver, as such my favourite tracks are Austria's A1-Ring and Italy's Monza circuit. Performance between tracks tend to stay fairly similar hovering around 60 FPS on a nice clean track with a few cars in close proximity. The graphic settings for the test was set at Full, which maxes out all the settings such as viewing distance, car detail, shadows, mirror reflections etc.

The overall gaming performance of the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra surprised me as I wasn't expecting much out of such a low-priced card. While you can't expect to crank every setting to its highest level or enable anything beyond 2X FSAA in every game and still get acceptable performance at resolutions above 1024x768, most gamers looking for a card in this price range couldn't be asking for much more.

Next Page: 3DMark2001 SE and ChameleonMark