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
There's literally nothing in the Splinter Cell benchmarks. 36.7FPS at 1024x768 4xAA/8xAF isn't all that impressive for a couple of £300 accelerators. Sometimes it's just the way a game is coded. Halo, for instance, runs rather poorly on high-end hardware
Overclocking
By its very nature, overclocking isn't an exact science. One can't guarantee that every sample will behave similarly. Ambient temperature, the PC's PSU, motherboard, and a host of other factors combine to produce sample-specific results. Coolbits was used to inch up the 3D clocks. AquaMark3 was run to test stability at the inflated speeds.
550MHz core (up from 475MHz) and 1040MHz (up from 950MHz) memory represents a healthy frequency overclock.
10% more performance still puts it behind ATI's Radeon 9800 XT. There's something to be said for an 8-pipe rendering design.
But UT2003's high-detail test tips the balance back in the favour of the overclocked MSI card. We wonder what an 9800 XT @ 550MHz core and 1.04GHz RAM would make of it.
