@sswift: no offence mate, I find your system very impressive and I'm even considering purchasing it. What I mean with 'not the fastest system in the world' is that I don't think it'll be possible to get the same amount of shadows as Splinter Cell and still have it running smoothly. That doesn't mean your system sucks, but just that the kind of shadows/lighting effects as described in the topic is still a bit science-fiction for us Blitzers...
-EDIT- With older cards I meant the card in my sig, which is based on the GeForce2 chipset. While hardly cutting edge technologies now, there are plenty of games with shadowing that work fine with it. But they probably use another method, like you said with rendering to textures or something.
-EDIT- With older cards I meant the card in my sig, which is based on the GeForce2 chipset. While hardly cutting edge technologies now, there are plenty of games with shadowing that work fine with it. But they probably use another method, like you said with rendering to textures or something.