Date:
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Category:
GPU / Video Cards
Manufacturers:
N/A
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett

Lost Planet Performance and DX10

The first game to support DirectX 10 out of the box is on the shelves. We will take a quick look at GPU performance scaling as well as DX9 versus DX10 image quality with screenshot comparisons. Is it time to upgrade to Vista for DX10?

Introduction

We have all been waiting for a PC video game to be released into retail with “native” DirectX 10 support. We all thought Crysis would be the first game to be delivered with this support, but it isn’t here yet unfortunately. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, is now for sale and does boast DX10 support. Lost Planet’s roots are planted in the Xbox 360 but it has been ported over for PC gamers. There have been many upgrades made to the PC version of the game, namely DX10 functionality and at least one DX10-only feature. When you launch the game you can chose to enable DirectX 9 mode or DirectX 10 mode. The graphic upgrades from Xbox to PC include resolution support to 2560x1600, improved shadow quality, parallax occlusion normal mapping, image-based ambient occlusion, higher detail textures, the use of vertex texture fetch for the animation system and depth buffer reads improved for soft particles.

DX10 Payload

The primary benefit of DirectX 10 allows a shadow setting of “High” to be enabled (versus “Medium” in DX9) which provides soft shadows. Soft shadows make the edges of shadows smoothly fade out with no aliasing. Well done soft shadows can greatly increase the “immersion factor” of a game and really lend to your overall gaming experience. We also noticed some contrast and slight texture differences outdoors in the game which we will show you.

Our Focus

Since this game allows us to easily run it in DX9 mode or DX10 mode it is fairly simple to make performance and image quality changes and comparisons of those changes. The goals of this article are to see how GPUs scale in performance in this game both in DX9 and DX10 mode, and we are also going to examine image quality between DX9 and DX10 modes with the quality settings and other eye candy at its highest settings. Quite simply, we want to see what DX10 delivers in this early native DX10 title. Also, a lot of readers have been curious to know if the likes of the 320 MB GeForce 8800 GTS and Radeon HD 2900 XT will be powerful enough for DX10 and we will find out.

Apples to Apples

Testing will be done a bit differently for this article since we are exploring specific DX10 gaming impacts in Lost Planet rather than comparing what sort of gaming experience a specific video card delivers in a wide a range of games. We are going to keep the in-game settings and resolution and AA/AF at the same levels and compare in an “Apples-to-Apples” manor. This is being done so that we can see how GPU performance scales. Then we will compare the highest-playable settings with an included table of all the video cards tested here comparing DX9 and DX10 performance. We will then dive into image quality comparisons.