![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, August 01, 2007
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
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?
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Lost Planet was released for the PC on June 26, 2007 and is one of the first mainstream video games to support the new Microsoft DirectX 10 technology offered exclusively on Windows Vista.
Lost Planet pits Wayne Holden, the hero, against hordes of massive, insect-like beasts known as the Akrid. At the same time, he must fight against a rival band of Snow Pirates to unravel the mysteries surrounding his past and his shattered memories of fighting alongside his father.
Originally developed as a console title, Lost Planet comes to the PC after quite an interval for retooling the graphics and controls to better mesh with the playing styles and high expectations of PC gamers. The result is a truly entertaining game with easy-to-use controls, excellent graphical fidelity, and simple and addictive gameplay mechanics.
DX9 vs. DX10 Apples-to-Apples
Our manual test runs us through 10 minutes of gameplay which showcases indoor and outdoor areas, Akrid encounters, pirate encounters, and plenty of intense weather effects to truly test the graphics hardware outfitted in our testing machine.
We are running the game at the same in-game settings on all the video cards, hence “apples-to-apples” does apply here. Everything is set to “High” except for shadows; those are on “Medium” for these tests, in both DX9 and DX10 mode. The reason for this medium shadow setting will be explained later.
There is one problem that we experience with the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT you need to be aware of. With Catalyst 7.7 we found that the Radeon HD 2900 XT in Lost Planet was not rendering Anisotropic filtering at all. For the life of us we could not get it working, whether forced from the game or the control panel, it did not work in DX9 or DX10 mode at all. The fix was to use the yet-to-be released Catalyst 7.8 drivers provided to us by ATI. This new driver to be released in August will fix the broken AF in Lost Planet.
DirectX 9
Note the color of the lines in the graph, there are four of them representing each video card. The light blue line is the GeForce 8800 Ultra, light yellow is the GeForce 8800 GTX, red is the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and purple is the GeForce 8800 GTS . We will look at the Radeon HD 2900 XT in comparison in the graph below.
In DirectX 9 mode we see the video cards scale exactly as we would think they would, the Ultra is on top, then the GTX, then the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB and finally the 320 MB GeForce 8800 GTS trails. What is interesting is the performance gap between the 320 MB and 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS. Rember these video cards are clocked at the same frequencies, the only difference is the RAM capacity. It seems that the amount of RAM is affecting performance to a very great degree in this game.
While the GeForce 8800 Ultra is the fastest, the GeForce 8800 GTX is not far behind. There does seem to be a noticeable gap between the 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS and GeForce 8800 GTX, so dropping down to the GTS will cause a performance hit, but it isn’t massive. The largest drop is with the 320 MB model.
The Radeon HD 2900 XT is doing quite well here; for the most part even edging out the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB video card.
DirectX 10
The framerate performance of every video card compared suffers in DirectX 10 mode versus DirectX 9 mode. Keep in mind that we are keeping the in-game and driver quality settings exactly the same. Some video cards however drop more than others. The 320 MB 8800 GTS takes a mighty nosedive, as you can see nearing the 5 FPS mark at times which is completely unplayable. Otherwise, GPU scaling is exactly the same as DX9 with the Ultra and GTX being fastest, then the 640 MB 8800 GTS, then the 320 MB 8800 GTS. It seems in DX10 at these settings the only two cards which are playable is the 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra.
The Radeon HD 2900 XT also takes a massive nose dive in performance when switching to DirectX 10 and is now butting heads with the 320 MB GeForce 8800 GTS.
On the next page we will dive into some more specific comparisons, including “High” Shadow performance.