HIS All-In-Wonder 9600 XT

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow was originally created for the Xbox and then ported over to the PC, and it's based around an NVIDIA-specific code path that makes use of the Unreal engine. Ubisoft added in extra, more improved lighting, which can provide some of the best looking real-time shadows with the exception of Doom 3. Due to a number of problems that were the result of a lazy port from the Xbox to PC, ATI were forced to render the title with the DirectX backdoor that allows them to run a shadowing technique known as "projector shadows". This does not have quite the same standard of image quality as the buffered shadowing technique that is used by NVIDIA's boards, but the quality is about the same.

Despite the game not being able to use Anti-Aliasing due to the title making use of post-filtering effects such as night vision and thermal vision, it still proves to be a very graphic-intense title - the results here show that this is the case. It's great proof that the intense shadows and lighting effects that are used in this title prove to be a little too much for the 9600 series on maximum details. We have to bear in mind that there are three "auto saves" in the section of the game that we are using as our test period, so the frame rates are slightly lower than you will experience in game. The frame rates would appear to be unplayable from a first look, but when you take in to account that the frame rate drops to less than 5 frames per second on three occasions (the auto saves), the frame rates are very playable - most certainly on the two 9600 XT's.

Need For Speed: Underground

Need For Speed: Underground is one of the best looking driving simulations out on the market at the moment, making use of DirectX 9.0 features such as motion blur gives the game a realistic feel, while the reflections from other objects on to both the road and car give the game that extra bit of eye candy that takes it above other driving simulations. The title is soon to be updated with a sequel, which should bring even more DirectX 9.0 features into the title.

Performance appears to be slightly limited by both the GPU's lack of texture fill rate, which is greatly shown by the differences between the two 9600 XT's and the 9600 PRO; the latter is nearly five frames per second slower than the AIW 9600 XT. Again, the lack of memory bandwidth appears to mar the possible performance levels that the 9600 series could achieve if the boards were equipped with a 256-bit memory bus. The differences in image quality from choosing a relatively low resolution with Anti-Aliasing enabled and a high resolution with only Anisotropic Filtering applied is a tough choice, but our preference was to increase resolution and leave Anti-Aliasing to the more-capable graphics boards.