Video cards

The Chronicles of Riddick Performance

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is based on the movie franchise of the same name, and provides a wild mix of kick-ass action and intriguing game environments. This hybrid game is similar to what Half-Life brought to the table, as you take the role of escaped con Riddick, and fight your way through some exceptionally rendered game levels. The in-game detail levels are also an important consideration, as moving the Shader Model above 2.0 can turn the game into a slide show on older cards, and even at SM 2.0, the game can bring most hardware to its knees.

Chronicles of Riddick is another game benchmark that really pushes our high-end graphics cards to the limit, even at standard detail settings, and should give us a good look at mainstream graphics performance. CoR testing switches things up a bit, and now we see the ASUS EAX1950PRO 256MB falling back from the GeForce 7900 GS, while still keeping well ahead of the Radeon X1800 XL/GeForce 7600 GT mainstream crowd. These results are a bit surprising, even with the Radeon X1650 XT posting lackluster results, but we'll have to wait until the AF/AA results are in before making a true determination.

Chronicles of Riddick AA and AF Performance

The ASUS EAX1950PRO 256MB does make up some ground against the GeForce 7900 GS, and comes very close to equaling its performance, but the ASUS card still falls a bit short.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Performance

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is another in a long line of third-person games that rely on stealth and planning, rather than just hammering the fire button repeatedly. This innovative game design also gives our video cards a different kind of test, which is very evident in the standard Ubisoft Lighthouse demo. Better still, the latest patches also enable SM3.0, which we have enabled in all benchmark testing.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is one very demanding game benchmark, especially with SM3.0 enabled, and it really gave our video cards a nice workout. This benchmark gets the ASUS EAX1950PRO 256MB back on track, and it easily outperforms the GeForce 7900 GS at both resolutions, while passing the GeForce 7900 GT at 1600x1200.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory AA and AF Performance

Once the anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing settings are brought into play, the ASUS EAX1950PRO 256MB posts even better relative scores, and slides into second place, just behind the powerful GeForce 7950 GT.