Big GPU Shootout – Revisited

Lost Planet DX10 benchmark

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a Capcom port of an Xbox 360 game. It takes place on the icy planet of E.D.N. III which is filled with monsters, pirates, big guns, and huge bosses. This frozen world highlights high dynamic range lighting (HDR) as the snow-white environment reflects blinding sunlight as DX10 particle systems toss snow and ice all around. The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10 and there isn’t really much of a difference between the two versions except perhaps shadows. Unfortunately, the DX10 version doesn’t look that much better when you’re actually playing the game and it still runs slower than the DX9 version.

We use the in-game performance test from the retail copy of Lost Planet and updated through Steam to the latest version for our runs. This run isn’t completely scripted as the creatures act a little differently each time you run it, requiring multiple runs. Lost Planet’s Snow and Cave demos are run continuously by the performance test and blend into each other.

Here are our benchmark results with the more demanding, Snow. All settings are fully maxed out in-game including 4xAA/16xAF.

First at 1920×1200 resolution:

And now at 1680×1050:

And at 1440×900:

TriFire rules the multi-GPU category beating out the HD 4890 CrossFire and our HD 4870-X2. However, all of our single-GPU video cards have troubles with the minimum frame rates and are unsatisfactory at even 1680×1050 except for the GTX 280 which make a very strong showing. Again, the HD 4890 makes a nice improvement over the HD 4870 but not enough to make much difference at the bottom.