Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , August 26, 2013
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Splinter Cell: Blacklist Image Quality Video Card Review

Splinter Cell: Blacklist is out, and we dive into this game and pay close attention to image quality and detail. NVIDIA and Ubisoft have implemented some first-time features ever seen in the Splinter Cell series, with DX11 Tessellation, HBAO+, and TXAA. We look at each of these technologies and see if it helps boost the quality of this game on the PC.

Introduction

In this evaluation we are going to look at image quality in a brand new game. Splinter Cell: Blacklist, an action adventure game, developed and published by Ubisoft, was released on August 20th, 2013. Currently, this game holds a Metascore of 7.8 out of 10 on the PC. Gameplay reviews have been favorable, with mostly positive feedback on the gameplay.

NVIDIA has had a huge helping hand in this game, helping Ubisoft to implement certain technologies into the game to make it more visually appealing on the PC. There are several articles related to Splinter Cell: Blacklist on GeForce.com. There is an article posted explaining the new NVIDIA HBAO+ technology which is making its debut in this game. There is an article posted announcing that Splinter Cell: Blacklist will be bundled with GeForce GTX graphics cards. Finally, there is an article praising Splinter Cell: Blacklist at this year's GamesCom 2013. NVIDIA has invested heavily in this game.

Base Graphics Engine

Article Image

Splinter Cell: Blacklist is, at its heart, based on Unreal Engine 2.5, with Havok physics. This is the same engine Splinter Cell: Conviction used in 2010, and the same engine Splinter Cell: Double Agent used in 2006, and even the same engine that the original Splinter Cell used in 2004.

Since 2004 this entire series has stuck with the same graphics engine, despite newer ones being available, like Unreal Engine 3 and others. This inherently puts the game behind its time, as Unreal Engine 2.5 is showing its age. Even Unreal Engine 3 is showing its age as we look toward Unreal Engine 4 now.

That said, the engine is heavily modified, and of course NVIDIA has made sure some current technology is actually in the game.

New Technologies Implemented

Today, we are going to explore the image quality of this game and look at a few of the key technologies implemented in this game from NVIDIA. NVIDIA and Ubisoft have worked together to introduce Phong Tessellation into this game. This is the first time that a Splinter Cell game has used Tessellation. In the previous Splinter Cell games, only Parallax Mapping was used. Another new technology created by NVIDIA is what NVIDIA is calling HBAO+. This is an Ambient Occlusion technique that improves upon the standard HBAO, which we've seen in games like Battlefield 3. NVIDIA made sure its TXAA antialiasing technique was included in the game. Finally, this game runs under the DX11 API, the first time in this series. Let's explore each one.

The first notable thing to mention is that this game runs under either DX9 or DX11. For the first time in any Splinter Cell cell game there is DX11 support. The previous game, Splinter Cell: Conviction only ran under DX9. DX11 will inherently help the game to run more efficiently on the PC and benefit from native DX11 performance improvements the API allows. It has also allowed NVIDIA to help Ubisoft implement the Phong Tessellation used in this game. DX11 on its own doesn't change the graphics quality, but it gives developers the opportunity to do so if they wish.

Phong Tessellation and Shading

Phong Shading is an interpolation technique used for surface shading. Phong Shading is more advanced than flat or Gouraud shading because it uses interpolated per-pixel surface normals to help calculate each pixel's color.

Phong Tessellation is efficient and compliments Phong Shading by providing significantly improved contours. Phong Tessellation is a geometric version of Phong normal interpolation that is applied to vertex positions. More about Phong Tessellation can be read about here in this detailed PDF. What's important to note for this game is that Phong Tessellation is used on characters and some environmental details. We will have to see if we can spot it, it can be turned off and on under DX11.

HBAO+

Ambient Occlusion (AO) (the shadow/occlusion model of the ambient lighting in a scene) is not a new concept, but the method of which it is achieved is evolving. There is, at the base, standard SSAO or Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. SSAO is the simplest method of describing Ambient Occlusion, supported in many games in the last few years. In 2008 NVIDIA introduced an SSAO algorithm called Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO). This HBAO uses a physically-based algorithm that approximates an integral with depth buffer sampling. We've seen HBAO used in Battlefield 3, Far Cry 3 supports it, Batman: Arkham City and many other games.

AMD also got into the SSAO scene by creating its own SSAO algorithm called High Definition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO). We've seen HDAO used heavily in Far Cry 3. HDAO was more precise than HBAO or SSAO in that game.

Debuting in Splinter Cell: Blacklist NVIDIA has introduced a newer method of HBAO it is calling HBAO+. NVIDIA had several goals with HBAO+ to improve upon HBAO. Its first goal was to make it fast enough to be rendered in full resolution in 1920x1200 resolution on high-end GPUs. Typically, the original HBAO was only rendered in low resolution shadow maps due to performance. The second goal was to maximize the efficiency of the implementation on DX11 GPUs by optimizing the locality of the samples that are taken from the input depth buffer. NVIDIA's third goal was to have HBAO+ always look better than the original HBAO, especially on scenes with thin objects such as grass and leaves.

HBAO+ is rendered in 2.7 ms of GPU time per frame in 1920x1200 on GTX680 and traditional HBAO in rendered in 9.2 ms of GPU time in 1920x1200 on GTX680.

TXAA

Finally, this game does support TXAA as well as FXAA. TXAA is designed specifically to reduce temporal aliasing (crawling and flickering while in motion). TXAA is a mix of hardware AA, custom AA resolve and a temporal filter. TXAA has improved spatial filtering over standard 2X MSAA and 4X MSAA. TXAA uses hardware MSAA in conjunction with a temporal filter. Typically, TXAA does take a performance hit, compared to just MSAA. We will look at image quality and comment on TXAA's performance in this article. In Crysis 3, we gave TXAA a negative conclusion based on its image quality, which blurred that game incredibly badly. We will see if that is the case here or not.