Best game to check shadow performance?

[sabeehali]

I was wondering what would be the best game to check for the shadow performance of a gpu in light of nv35's claim of a hidden surface removal for shadows, technique?

Would morrowind suffice?
Or would splinter cell or doom3 be better ?

But since most of these games use different techniques for shadows what benefits can one see from this type of techinque (the one introduced in nv35)?

 

[demalion]

Splinter Cell seems to use the nVidia's depth checking shadow acceleration.

It also seems it does not allow the NV35 to perform especially well in comparison to the R350, but the game has other demands that might prevent showing advantage (maybe "Class 1" and "Class 2" benchmarking for the NV35 would be best to showcase the advantages) and allow the R350 advantages to shine a bit (8 dependent texture ops per clock versus 4 for NV35 and using that for the shadow technique, scalar + 3 component vector opportunities for the heat vision/night vision shaders depending on which demos are tested, and some other stuff I could guess that also might not be right at all, etc. ).

 

[KimB]

Morrowind's shadow implementation is very buggy, in my experience, and only works on character models.

Neverwinter Nights is probably a bit closer to judging shadow performance, as it uses global shadowing using the stencil buffer.

The Tenebrae mod for Quake is probably also a good measurement, though the CPU limitations of that benchmark are so severe it can be hard to separate out the video card dependency.

Of course, these only test stencil shadows. There are other techniques available that will likely be chosen for performance reasons.