15. Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell is based on the new Unreal Engine and makes use of very complex light and shadow effects and pixel shader effects (v1.1). Half the frame rate is determined by normal 3D calculations, and half by shadow calculations. The CPU is not usually the limiting factor.

Working with Splinter Cell, the Satellite 5200 showed rather "obstinate" behavior. Normally, we run the demo with the maximum possible quality settings; for the representation of shadows we chose the "Projector" mode. The device, however, would not be "persuaded." In any case, the timedemo never ran completely and without errors. When it did run, the reproduction was poor, and then crashed with a blue screen. There was nothing left but to choose the "buffer" option for the shadows parameter.

System Performance: Sysmark 2002

Since system performance is only of secondary importance in this test, we ran the Sysmark 2002 application benchmark plugged in. The measurements were taken with two different resolutions (SXGA, UXGA) and 32 bits. We had to skip the measurements with the usual XGA resolution (1024 x 768 pixels) - no full benchmarking procedure was possible with Sysmark 2002 because of a reproducible script error.

The machine has excellent system performance. The measurements at various PowerMizer settings did not show any measurable impact on the performance with the application mix available in Sysmark 2002.