Well, I was all set to play Splinter Cell: Double Agent (for PC), and everything checked out during the system diagnostic tests... except for one thing: pixel shader. I had Pixel Shader 2.0, and the game required 3.0, so I needed to upgrade my ATI Radeon x700 Pro (PCIe) to something more... suitable.
Best Buy = awesome. I got this baby for about $250.00 (Approximately $500.00 at Fry's Electronics)
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Features
* 384 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
* Up to 48 pixel shader processors
* 8 vertex shader processors
* Up to 256-bit 8-channel GDDR4 memory interface
* Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
* Up to 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
* Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
* Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
* Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
* Fast Z-Buffer Clear
* Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine
* Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
* Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
* Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
* Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
* Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
* 3Dc+ texture compression o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
* High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
* Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0
Advanced Image Quality Features
* 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
* 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
* 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
* 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
o Up to 128-tap texture filtering
o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
* High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)
Avivo" Video and Display Platform
* High performance programmable video processor
o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
o DXVA support
o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
* Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
* HDR tone mapping acceleration
o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
* Flexible display support
o Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
+ DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready*
o Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
o Xilleon" TV encoder for high quality analog output
o YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
o Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
o Fast, glitch-free mode switching
o VGA mode support on all outputs
o Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
* Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550
* Playing HDCP content may require additional HDCP ready components, including but not limited to an HDCP ready monitor, disc drive and computer system.
CrossFire"
* Multi-GPU technology
* Four modes of operation:
o Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
o Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
o Scissor (compatibility)
o Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)
My graphics in Splinter Cell are amazing.
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Cleric "Cosmic" Vor'soth
CoT/MG Cosmic/HCA-3/SL/Drill Squad/Tadath/VEA/VE
[OPE][OTH][OPA][EW1][CDS][IH][GS][LM][SoS][CRoM][CoH][PoC][MSM][SCP][SoA][IOC]
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Cleric "Cosmic" Vor'soth
SL/KPR Cosmic/Lion 1-1/Lopen/VEDJ/VE
[VP][WoS2][KC1][SoY][EoP][OAK]
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