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TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL CHAOS THEORY – PC DEMO AND TECH SCREENS AVAILABLE NOW!

February 25, 2005 – PC gamers and techno-heads rejoice! The official single-player PC demo for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is now available for download. Be among the first to check out a level from this Spring’s most highly-anticipated title – weeks before the game hits shelves. You can find the demo at all of your favorite download spots http://downloads.gamezone.com/demos/d12223.htm and on www.splintercell.com. 

The demo features the Lighthouse map, the first level of the game, where Sam Fisher must investigate the kidnapping of an American citizen with some very sensitive – and valuable – intelligence. In addition to Sam’s new moves, weapons, and ability to operate closer to the enemy than ever before, players will enjoy complete immersion into the shadowy world of a Third Echelon operative – be sure to take a moment to marvel at the industry-leading features in terms of graphics and sound (details follow below). Stealth-action gaming doesn’t get any better than this, so download the demo today and get busy saving the world.

You can also check out a series of screens at http://pc.gamezone.com/gamesell/screens/s21978.htm that highlight the cutting edge features of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory’s PC engine, such as:

GRAPHICS DX8 SHADER MODEL 1.1 VERSION

  • Shaders architecture with diffuse and specular lighting parameters + environment reflection

  • All lighting components are considering the normal map

  • Specular lighting can be tuned depending on material properties (glossiness and strength)

  • Procedural animated texturing is available on all shader components (diffuse, normal map, specular mask, environment map)

  • Available for transparent materials

  • Real time reflection materials on flat surfaces

  • Complex character lighting with average compensation and translucency

  • Filtered soft shadow maps with bleeding removal

  • High resolution and no compression on character normal maps

DX9 SHADER MODEL 3.0 VERSION (include all SHADER MODEL 1.1 features)

  • Parallax mapping with height map support (virtual displacement mapping)

  • Enhanced filtered soft shadows

  • High dynamic range rendering

  • Tone mapping

  • Advance skin shader for character with subsurface scattering and improved light bleeding

  • High internal precision rendering (remove banding artifacts)

SOUND

  • EAX 2.0/3.0 filters for dynamic sound propagation and occlusion o EAX 3.0 has better quality filters and quality in general

  • EAX 2.0/3.0 reverbs

  • Volumetric sources

  • 4.0 ambient (ambient positioning)

  • Design for Audigy/Audigy2 generation of sound card (but can work on SB Live! Cards with reduced quality)

CPU

  • Multiple thread engine design (2 of those are significant) o Should give a significant advantage to CPU manufacturer with multiple simultaneous HW thread execution

  • Very high number of primitives sent to the graphic chips (average of 2000 per frame)

BENCHMARK FEATURES

  • Ability to enable or disable several features including (in game or as a command line option) o Normal mapped environment mapping (don’t use normal map when computing environment reflection) o Shadow map resolution from 512x512 to 2048x2048 o Antialiasing support o Anisotropic filtering support o Screen resolution including widescreen modes like 1280x720 o Reflection effect (turn on/off) o SM 3.0 Parallax mapping (turn on/off) o SM 3.0 shadow filtering quality o SM 3.0 HDR rendering (turn on/off) o Shader Model selection (1.1 or 3.0)

ART ASSETS

  • Up to 50k polygons per scene

  • Up to 500k polygons submitted per frame with shadows and shaders (multiple passes) with Shader Model 1.1 renderer

  • Up to 200k polygons submitted per frame with shadows and shaders (multiple passes) with Shader Model 3.0 renderer

  • Full usage of the shaders available in the engine

BENCHMARK PERFORMANCE • Very high pixel rate usage per frame with the best NV/ATI graphics cards available today barely able to reach 30 FPS at high resolution and medium quality settings • Very intense CPU usage per frame due to the usage of shaders and high CPU cost of changing vertex and pixel shaders/constants in the driver • Probably the most CPU or GPU intensive ever made on PC (slower FPS than any other game on the same hardware), Splinter Cell can afford to have lower FPS than shooters



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Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (PC)