Date:
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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BioShock DX10 Performance and Image Quality

BioShock, one of the most anticipated titles of recent history, hit the scene with a resounding BANG, bringing with it foul cries of RootKit! We look past the paranoia to find out what our shiny new DX10 video cards will do for us in BioShock.

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Test Setup

For our test system platform, we are using the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 processor at 2.93 GHz, and 2 GB of OCZ DDR2-800 RAM. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

Article Image

* = ATI provided a Windows Vista hotfix for Catalyst 7.8, which we applied for this test.

NVIDIA also provided a link to a hotfix, but it is a Microsoft-supplied update. We applied the 64-bit version of the hotfix, since we are using the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Video Card Comparison Setup

For this comparison we are using stock, default clock speeds on all video cards. So keep in mind that factory overclocked video cards may show slightly higher performance than what you see here. This was done to give everyone a "fair" showing and see how the GPUs will scale. With the 320 MB and 640 MB 8800 GTS having the same clock speeds we can see how RAM capacity affects this game as well. We are using Windows Vista Ultimate x64 throughout for both DX9 and DX10 evaluation.