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Lost Planet DirectX 10 Showdown
Posted May 25, 2007 by KevinIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Who would have ever thought a port of an Xbox 360 game would end up being the first DirectX 10 game released for Windows Vista? But that’s exactly what’s happened after games like Crysis, and Company of Heroes continue to shift their release dates. Finally, thanks to Capcom, we get to see what all the fuss behind DirectX 10 was really about, and blow up aliens and space bugs with greater detail than ever before … or do we?
Gamespot recently ran a test with Lost Planet for PC comparing DirectX 9 vs DirectX 10. And the final result? Disappointing to say the least. Those of you who rushed out and bought a GeForce 8800 GTX just to witness the shock and awe of DirectX 10 may have some more waiting to do. Taken from Gamespot’s test:
The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10, but we couldn’t tell much of a difference between the two versions. Shadows looked slightly better in DirectX 10, but that’s only because we could change the shadows setting to high, whereas in DirectX 9 we could only use the medium setting. After failing to see any major graphical differences between the two versions, we asked Capcom about what makes the DirectX 10 version special. A Capcom representative told us that the DirectX 10 improvements primarily enhanced performance by up to “10 to 20 percent” through the use of “geometry shaders, depth resolve, and stream output.” That means that the Lost Planet demo is only using DirectX 10 to increase performance, not to produce advanced graphics effects.
We found that the DirectX 10 version of Lost Planet performed markedly slower when compared to the DirectX 9 version at the exact same settings. Additionally, the high-quality shadows we saw in DirectX 10 didn’t seem to justify the performance hit. We did not perform an ATI versus Nvidia comparison because Capcom worked with Nvidia on the DirectX 10 development process and ATI didn’t have the opportunity to tune its Radeon HD 2900 XT for the demo release.
The Lost Planet demo isn’t a final version of the game, but the developers don’t have much time to add in new effects before the game’s June 26 release date. It looks like we can safely go back to waiting on Crysis or Company of Heroes for all those amazing DirectX 10 graphics.
Screenshot 1: DirectX 9
Screenshot 1: DirectX 10
Hit the jump for more screenshot comparisons.
Screenshot 2: DirectX 9
Screenshot 2: DirectX 10
Screenshot 3: DirectX 9
Screenshot 3: DirectX 10
Screenshot 4: DirectX 9
Screenshot 4: DirectX 10
Screenshot 5: DirectX 9
Screenshot 5: DirectX 10
Not a whole helluva lot of difference. At least the same can’t be said for Crysis, which appears to take much more advantage of the DirectX 10 tools. So it looks like we can all go back to waiting of the first real DirectX 10 game to be released.
Comments
Remember the days when FPS would release non-stop just for a quick buck, seems like many developers(crap ones) will start releasing games with DirectX 10 logos on them just to grab your attention.
Kevin Says:Yeah, so far it seems like DirectX 10 has been mostly a marketing tool by Microsoft to sell Vista. If the difference between DX9 and DX10 is as marginal as the screenshots above, I don’t see the need to upgrade for one or two games like Crysis that are built from the ground up to use DX 10 features - especially with Halo 3 looming on the horizon.
I’ll save my $2,000 for a new PC and use it for a high def TV instead.
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