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- Date:
- Monday , November 26, 2007
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
Hellgate London: DX10 vs. DX9 Gaming Experience
In 2038, London lies in ruins, but will Hellgate: London also lay your video card to waste? We'll run this new hybrid RPG/FPS through the paces and show you if your video card is up to the task for DX10 in Hellgate!
Testing Scenerio
For our testing scenario, we chose the Eastcheap level, which lies between Monument Station and the Templar Base. It is a somewhat large dungeon (by this game's standards) with long-range visibility in some areas and an abundance of demons for the slaughter. Our character is a level 23 Templar Blademaster, dual-wielding two swords, each imbued with all kinds of magical effects. These weapons give us spell effects to test the shader power of these video cards and allow us to get up close to the action to test performance in densely packed battles, sometimes with more than a dozen demons fighting in close-quarters. During our testing, we found that some of the train friendly stations (such as Monument Station) produced the lowest framerates we saw in the game, but since the stations are small, and combat is not allowed, they do not make ideal test candidates.
Due to the dynamic and randomized nature of the game, the layout of a given level, and the monsters which inhabit it, are subject to change at essentially any time. We found that the Eastcheap level offered us enough consistency that we are comfortable using it to measure performance.
AA and AF Options
For whatever reason, our attempts to force AA levels and AF levels from the video card control panels failed. Either the drivers are not enforcing these settings for this game, or the game is somehow ignoring them. Either way, it didn't work for us. The AF setting within the game is nothing but a checkbox to enable or disable AF. The in-game AA option is less cryptic, but still not perfectly clear. The available AA options are "Disabled, Low, Medium, High, and Very High". In familiar terms, those settings translate to None, 2X MSAA, 4X MSAA, 16X CSAA, and 16XQ CSAA respectively. We know this because the Hellgate London configuration file (an XML file located in the "...My Documents\My Games\Hellgate\Settngs" directory) represents the AA level in a human readable format.
The AF setting in the game's configuration file, however, is a different story. It is a binary 0 or 1, indicating AF is off or on, respectively. The game gives us no way to know what level of AF is actually being used. When AF was enabled in-game, it appears as though the game is using a 4X sample rate, but with all of the post-processing happening, it is hard to tell for sure. As a result, the tables and graphs below indicate "AF Enabled" where we have enabled AF from within the game itself.
DirectX 9
Hellgate: London features spartan graphics options. There are basically 7 major options which we are concerned with in DX9. The "Shader Detail" option adapts features such as lighting and blur effects. For example, when using the "Low" Shader Detail setting, characters are lit with low-detail vertex based light sources, whereas with the "Very High" setting, characters are lit with pixel shaders. The "Shadow Detail" setting allows you to select from varying levels of shadow quality, from stencil shadows with the "High" setting, down to blob shadows with the "Low" setting. Directly beneath the "Shadow Detail" setting is the "Dynamic Lights" checkbox. Obviously, this checkbox enables or disables the rendering of dynamic lights in the game.
The "Model Detail" option varies the complexity (polygon count) of the static and dynamic meshes used by the game. The "Model Viewing Distance" option predictably adjusts the distance at which models (almost all game assets) are drawn or culled by the renderer. The "Texture Detail" option selects the resolution of the textures that the game loads for objects. This option is of special importance for video cards with limited amounts of memory, such as 256 MB or lower. And the last option that we are mostly concerned about is the "Enhanced Weather" checkbox. This option enables or disables weather effects such as rain, and even blowing ash (London is burning, after all).
Judging solely by the graph of the numbers above, it would at first appear that the 8800 GT has plenty of headroom to use higher settings. Numbers can be deceiving. Remember that the train stations in this game are some of the most demanding areas, but are least suitable for testing. Essentially the only option we could have changed was the AA setting, increasing the setting to "Very High", which is 16xQ CSAA. Unfortunately, doing so rendered the train stations quite unplayable. It is true that players are going to spend the bulk of their time out fighting in the tunnels and streets, but plenty of time is also spent modifying weapons and armor, buying supplies, and talking to NPCs in these safe areas. We simply can't ignore choppy performance in these areas.
Here again, the graph above tells a different tale than the actual performance we experienced. It may at first appear that the Radeon HD 3850 had some room to grow our playable settings. During our testing, we found that we were limited by the relatively small framebuffer on that video card. The Radeon HD 3850 has only 256 MB of memory. Remember that Anti-aliasing at high resolutions requires a lot of video memory. During testing, we were forced to choose between 4X MSAA (the "Medium" setting) and "Very High" texture resolution.
Attempting to use any level of AA with "Very High" textures enabled caused the video card to run out of memory, which forced data to be swapped to system memory. That can have a catastrophic impact on performance, and in this case, it did. Using AA with the highest resolution textures caused unacceptable pauses during gameplay and made the game not only unplayable, but aggravating as well. In the end, we decided that sharp textures improved our gameplay experience more than AA did, so we opted to use "Very High" resolution textures and disable AA on the Radeon HD 3850.
DirectX 9 Performance Summary
It is worth noting that none of the settings above are, by any means, low. All of the video cards in this evaluation performed admirably, and they fell into line exactly where we thought they would be. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX gave us the best experience by a small margin, and that shouldn't surprise anyone. Gamers with the new GeForce 8800 GTs and 24" Widescreen monitors could easily lower their AA setting to "Medium" (4X MSAA) and increase the resolution to 1920x1200 with minimal impact on image quality. The new ATI video cards made a very strong showing here, falling into line right behind the GeForce 8800 GT. The performance of the Radeon HD 3850 was marred only by its small framebuffer. We are past the point where 512+ MB of video memory is just a good idea, and moving swiftly into "required" territory in next-generation games.
DirectX 10
When we switch the game to DirectX 10, we see two new options appear in the graphics menu. The immediately noticeable option is the addition of the "DX10 Smoke" checkbox. This checkbox changes the smoke from a simple particle/sprite effect to a more advanced, and more realistic smoke effect. The next new option is the addition of the "Extreme" level under the "Shader Detail" setting box. The extreme setting enables effects like depth-of-field and motion-blur.
Currently, there appears to be a bug with Hellgate: London which is preventing us from enabling AA under DirectX 10 while using a GeForce 8800 series video card. Whenever we attempted to enable it, the display went black and stayed that way, forcing us to hit Control-Alt-Delete to regain control over the system. When we did so, we were immediately greeted with a message stating that "Hellgate: London has stopped responding" and needed to be shut down. This happened every time we attempted to enable AA in Hellgate under DX10 with a GeForce 8 series video card using several different driver sets. We are currently awaiting a reply from NVIDIA to see what they have to say about this problem we experienced and will update this evaluation when we have the information. Hopefully a driver or game patch will fix the problem.
In any case, the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GT ran a close race in DX10 mode. The GTX was playable with a higher resolution at 1920x1200, and the GT was close. It was just south of the border of being playable at 1920x1200 on the 8800 GT, but it was not smooth enough to be consistently playable. There were moments of graphical lag when making quick turns, and it was irritating. People with more or faster system memory or a quicker CPU than our test system is equipped with may have better luck there.
The good news is that the ATI video cards have no problem enabling AA in DX10 mode in Hellgate. The bad news is that they don't have the performance to do it at 1600x1200 with high in-game settings.
When we switched the engine version to DirectX 10, the "Shader Detail" setting automatically set itself to "Extreme" and the "DX10 Smoke" option was automatically enabled. With both ATI video cards, we had to lower the "Shader Detail" setting back down to "Very High", and using the Radeon HD 3850, we had to disable the "DX10 Smoke" option as well. Unfortunately, this meant that DX10 was no longer doing anything visible for us in Hellgate with the Radeon HD 3850, and it was only giving us nice smoke with the Radeon HD 3870.
In addition to disabling DX10 smoke, we had to disable the "Enhanced Weather" setting as well when we tested with the Radeon HD 3850. It gave us a consistent performance increase without a persistent difference in image quality. Weather effects are something you may not miss if you don’t see them while you are playing. Since the levels in this game are generated randomly, you never know if it supposed to be raining anyway, so if you don't see it, you may not miss it.
The GeForce 8800 GT predictably outperformed both ATI video cards here, and we were able to use both DX10-only options without a problem using those video cards.
DirectX 10 Performance Summary
Overall, DirectX 10 performance was better than we expected. We have seen games tank under DX10 too many times, so we were genuinely happy to see it perform well with all of these video cards. We found that if you disable the DX10 smoke option, and select the "Very High" option under Shader Detail in DX10, you have essentially disabled every benefit you could see from DirectX 10. Therefore, we can suggest that Radeon HD 3850 owners not bother running Hellgate London in DX10 mode, whether they are already running Windows Vista or not. Apart from that concern, we were surprised and happy with DirectX 10 performance in Hellgate. With the GeForce 8800 GTX, GeForce 8800 GT, and the Radeon HD 3870, there were definite visual improvements.