Rainbow Six Vegas

This First Person tactical shooter is based on the new Unreal 3 game engine, it looks splendid and takes a very high end video card if you want to run it at high resolutions. It makes heavy use of shaders and excels in delivering close very realistic Las Vegas setting, with a series of Casinos on the strip that you need to “clean”. Our low end cards were having a hard time here as you will see.



Our first benchmark was run at 640x480 resolution with low quality setting in-game.



The results obtained here are very similar to the Oblivion scores, the stock 7300 GT DDR2 has frame drops to 7, but when overclocked matches the stock 8500 GT. The 7300 GT DDR3 surpasses the 8500 GT at stock, but falls behind once overclocked. Again the increase in performance when overclocking the 7300 GT DDR3 is disappointing; the 8500 GT on the other hard really shines, a 50% increase!

When we increased the resolution and detail settings in Oblivion the 8500 GT stayed well ahead of the rest, let’s see if this is the case in Rainbow Six. We set the resolution to a stressful high 1024x786 and enabled HDR:



Not quite the same result here, the 7300 GT DDR2 drops out of the race, unless you like slideshows. At stock speeds the 7300 GT DDR3/8500 GT were also to slow. Only when overclocked we got somewhat playable results; what we see here is the 7300 GT DDR3 taking the lead, not by a lot (+7% average FPS) but noticeable in the minimum FPS area.

In our Colin McRae test the game remained enjoyable at 800x600, in Rainbow Six it was quite a pixel blur at 640x480 and finding the bad guys was a challenge, upping the resolution to 1024x768 helped a lot and made the game much more fun to play.

Next up, Supreme Commander & Power Usage ->