Splinter Cell: Double Agent: A Performance Analysis

Final Words

Splinter Cell: Double Agent is a very enjoyable game in spite of its bugs, and it does justice to the Splinter Cell series. While there are areas where the graphics could be improved, the SM3.0 effects make the game look very good. Sam Fisher and the other characters look better than in previous Splinter Cell games, and you can see the attention to detail the developers had with things like beard stubble and the sweat on his skin.

The gameplay is different than in previous Splinter Cells, and it's fun being able to play as a double agent, infiltrating the ranks of a secret terrorist organization. The game also gets harder as you progress, and it can get complicated trying to juggle objectives for both the NSA and JBA, but the greater challenges make the game that much more enjoyable. Playing the game in scenarios where there is broad daylight, which you have to do in much of the game, makes for an interesting challenge as well, especially for those who are familiar with the Splinter Cell series and are more comfortable slinking around in the dark like a cowardly harbinger of death.

Looking at performance with Double Agent, our tests clearly show that ATI cards get better performance compared to their direct-price competition from NVIDIA. There are a lot of potential reasons as to why this is the case, but we suspect it has something to do with a rush from the publisher to get the PC version of this Xbox 360 game out the door. We saw similar issues with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which favored ATI hardware more than NVIDIA at the time of its release. Some NVIDIA cards run Double Agent well, but because of the fact that ATI did better over all at running the game than NVIDIA, an ATI part would be the wiser choice if you were looking for a card solely to run this game. Also, as we said earlier, Double Agent seems to run much more stably with ATI's hardware (without bugs, crashes, etc.) as opposed to NVIDIA's.

The fact that the game runs better on ATI hardware than NVIDIA's parts could come from a variety of factors - drivers, the programmers, and/or the specific types of shaders/effects used in the game. We can speculate (and hope) that as we saw with Oblivion, patches and driver updates will possibly fix the bugs and close the gap in performance between ATI and NVIDIA with this game. Even so, the fact that Splinter Cell: Double Agent does not currently support the NVIDIA 8800 series is unacceptable. Also, the problems with SLI and CrossFire are unfortunate, and it would have been nice if support had been provided for multi-GPU solutions. It may be possible that some of the effects used just aren't going to benefit from multi-GPU configurations, but whether or not Ubisoft puts any time in to fixing this, ATI and NVIDIA will almost certainly be looking for a solution.

Overall the game feels rushed, not in the storyline or gameplay necessarily, but in basic things like the interface and overall game stability. There are a lot of hardware incompatibilities which will leave some people, especially 8800 owners, with no current means to play the game after paying up their hard-earned money to buy it. It might be more understandable if the problems were with older-generation cards that were phased out, but on the 8800 - NVIDIA's flagship solution for highest performance - it's just not right.

We aren't sure why this latest addition to the Splinter Cell series was released with so many problems. Even though we've seen similar issues with newly-released games in the past, Double Agent happens to have more problems than usual for a game of this type. At any rate, we hope there will be some patches released soon that will fix these major issues. They should have been addressed before Double Agent's release, but the holiday season can cause some unfortunate effects on things like product launches. In the mean time, hopefully you have a better idea of how GPU performance stacks up in something other than a FPS for a change.