I was reading through this thread on Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and wanted to test that game on this system. Surprisingly, it appears to display almost all shadows and light sources correctly. Here are a couple of screenshots for comparison:
Pandora_Nvidia_Fx5900.jpg
Pandora_ATI_X800.jpg
Dynamic shadows seem to be slightly softer on the Nvidia FX card, and there is some additional (cosmetic) shadowing around the window frame. Otherwise, not much difference. To me, the important thing is that all light sources and dynamic shadows render correctly on the X800 since they are used by the game for stealth. From what I've seen in Phil's video, those elements become broken on cards which use the unified shader architecture, meaning Radeon HD 2xxx and Nvidia 8xxx series or later.
My X800 using Catalyst 7.11 drivers passes all the relevant checks in the game's config utility, and delivers 30-60 FPS at the 1280x1024 resolution. I consider that fairly playable for a stealth game.
Pandora_Config.jpg
While I would have preferred to play this game on my GeForce FX 5900XT, the frame rate is simply too low at 1280x1024. With maxed graphical options, it often drops to 15-20 FPS, which is not great even for a slow paced stealth game. However, this system with the Radeon X800 offers a viable alternative and plays the game reasonably well at those settings. Just thought I'd share that in case anyone else is planning to revisit Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.