GPU Shoot-Out – Part II – Setting New Benches
Lost Planet DX10 benchmark
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a Capcom port of an Xbox 360 game which became the first DX10 game, as other games had DX10 patch delays around the same time. The game takes place on the icy planet of E.D.N. III which is filled with monsters, pirates, big guns, and huge bosses. The planet has limited resources and very hostile native inhabitants known as the Akrid, an insect-like race. This frigid world makes a great environment to highlight the benefits of high dynamic range lighting (HDR) as the snow-white environment reflects blinding sunlight, while DX10 particle systems toss snow and ice all around. Akrid contain a thermal energy source inside their body that are used to provide Wayne with both heat and energy. This energy is vital to your health in the game, instead of relying on a traditional health meter to keep you alive and also moving along.
The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10 and there isn’t really much of a difference between the two versions. Shadows look slightly better in DirectX 10. It seems that Lost Planet is primarily using DirectX 10 to increase performance, not to produce advanced graphics effects much beyond DX9c. Unfortunately, the DX10 version doesn’t look that much better, especially in motion. You may be able to pick out more shader effects in screenshots, but these aren’t particularly noticeable when you’re actually playing the game, and the DX10 version still runs slower than the DX9 version.
There are two versions of this benchmark. One was released as a stand-alone demo and the other is in-game. We chose the in-game demo from the retail copy of Lost Planet released on June 26, 2007 and updated through Steam to the latest version for our benchmark runs. This run isn’t completely scripted as the bugs spawn and act a little differently each time you run the demo. The benchmark is more of a scripted flyby of the level with “noclip” turned on; the bugs rely on game AI to direct their actions. This means the benchmark won’t make an absolutely perfect comparison between different hardware setups, even with identical game settings. So we ran it many times.
Lost Planet’s Snow and Cave demos are run continuously in-game and blend into each other. Here are our benchmark results with Snow and Cave – first at 19×12 resolution:
Now at 16×10:
We can see video cards still struggling with Lost Planet – especially in their minimum frame rates. Crossfire or 4870-X2 would be a good idea for this game at 19×12. It looks like scaling has been improved for X2/X3 crossfire over the last driver set.
