Date:
Monday , October 08, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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World in Conflict: DX10 Performance and IQ

World in Conflict will test your mettle as a military commander, and your computer as a DirectX 10 gaming machine. Does the DirectX 10 rendering mode offer any visual or performance improvements over the DirectX 9 rendering mode?

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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.

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Notes:

  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT in Windows XP - For DirectX 9 testing under Windows XP, we used the latest Catalyst 7.9 hotfix driver.

  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT in Windows Vista - For DirectX 10 testing under Windows Vista, ATI provided us with a final build, non WHQL version of Catalyst 7.10, which we applied for this test. There are performance improvements specific to this game with Catalyst 7.10.

  • NVIDIA GeForce 8 series cards in Windows Vista – We used NVIDIA ForceWare version 163.71 for Windows Vista x64 which is currently in beta stage.

  • NVIDIA GeForce 8 series cards in Windows XP – We used NVIDIA ForceWare version 163.71 for Windows XP x86 which is WHQL certified.

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 both ATI and NVIDIA a "fair" showing and see how the GPUs will scale. Since the 320 MB and 640 MB versions of the GeForce 8800 GTS have the same clock speeds, we can see how RAM capacity affects this game as well. We are using Windows Vista Ultimate x64 for DirectX 10 testing and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 for DirectX 9 testing to ensure that the game is running in DX9 mode.