How we tested:

With the image quality portion of our in-depth look at BioShock for PC out of the way, it's now time for us to look at how a range of high-end and mid-range graphics cards perform in the title at various resolutions.

As there is no in-built benchmarking utility, we have used FRAPS to record framerate over the course of three 90 second manual runthroughs in the Neptune's Bounty level. We averaged the three average frame rates recorded by FRAPS, but reported the median low framerate instead of the average in order to weed out the outliers.

The runthrough starts at the beginning of the level and ends in the basement of Fontaine Fisheries. Because of the way the non-playing characters roam around levels in an inconsistent manner, we decided it was best to benchmark without any fighting and a minimal number of non-playing characters left alive. There was just one Big Daddy and a lone Splicer left alive, which we intercepted at very similar points in our runthrough.

High-end Performance:

For our high-end graphics tests, we used the following system:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (quad-core, 3.00GHz – 333 x 9); Asus Striker Extreme motherboard (nForce 680i SLI); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000W PSU; Windows Vista Ultimate x86; Nvidia nForce standalone drivers version 15.00 WHQL.

Graphics cards:

• Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB -- operating at 612/1500/2160MHz using Forceware 163.44 beta
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB -- operating at 575/1350/1800MHz using Forceware 163.44 beta
  
• BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB -- operating at 550/1300/1600MHz using Forceware 163.44 beta
  
• ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB -- operating at 742/1650MHz using ATI Catalyst 8.401 BioShock hotfix
  
• BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB -- operating at 550/1300/1600MHz using Forceware 163.44 beta

All graphics settings were set to their highest values and Vsync was disabled. Unfortunately, the game doesn't support anti-aliasing at the moment under DirectX 10 and we encountered stability issues when forcing anti-aliasing under DirectX 9.0. Therefore, we've benchmarked with no anti-aliasing at all.

With that said, it's not quite as bad as it sounds if you've looked through the screenshots on the previous pages.




In the game's DirectX 9.0 mode, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT performs exceptionally well, as it consistently outperforms the GeForce 8800 GTX and is faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra at 1680x1050 and 1600x1200. Having said that, in a blind taste test, you are not going to notice the difference between these cards, as the differences in frame rates are very small.

However, if you're comparing the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and 320MB cards to the Radeon HD 2900 XT, you will experience smoother gameplay on the latter at 1920x1200.





Things change quite dramatically under DirectX 10 though, as the Radeon HD 2900 XT is now the slowest card tested as it suffers a fairly hefty performance drop, while Nvidia's cards saw a slight performance increase across the board. At 1680x1050 and 1600x1200, the Radeon HD 2900 XT delivers a very similar gaming experience to the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB and 640MB cards, albeit with considerably lower average frame rates – critically though, the minimum frame rate remains close enough to 30fps for the experience to be smooth.

At higher resolutions than this, the 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS starts to trail behind the 640MB version, but it still remains faster than the HD 2900 XT – you'll also get a smoother gameplay experience on either the 320MB or 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS cards, thanks to the higher frame rate. Once you step up to 2560x1600, the only card that really gives an acceptable gaming experience is the GeForce 8800 Ultra, but even then it's not as silky smooth as some would like – it's certainly very playable and not overly choppy though. The GeForce 8800 GTX, on the other hand, was a little choppy at times, and we noticed some occasional pauses as we were opening doors.