Darkstar One

We ran the high end through the same strenuous process as the mid-range, except obviously everything was cranked up a notch. Space pirates, police and bounty hunters were blown into space as I jetted round like Mel Gibson after a few beers.

High-End System Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (operating at 2600MHz, 13x200MHz), ABIT AN8 32X (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS4000 Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-3-3-7-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; Onboard AC'97 sound; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 platform drivers, version 6.86.

Video Cards:

• BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 670/1640MHz using Forceware 91.31;
  
• Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 650/1550MHz using Catalyst 6.7 WHQL;
  
• BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 425/1050MHz using Forceware 91.31 WHQL;
  
• Sapphire Radeon X1800XL 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 500/1000MHz using Catalyst 6.4 WHQL;

The game performed best on the X1900 - something that I found confusing considering that the game is sponsored and supported by Nvidia. The whole experience on wide screen is phenomenal though, I truly felt immersed into the space world. The high resolutions also meant that the screen was less obsured by the HUD, a definite advantage.

Conclusions

I must mention the buggy nature of the game at the moment. Though Ascaron is dedicated to improving the situation with quick releases of patches, it is still temperemental at the best of times. We've already documented the joystick issues but on top of that, in my benchmarking I found that the screen would inexplicably garble if I tried to lower texture level details whilst on a high resolution. Something I hope will be fixed in the future.

Overall, the game is great value. At only £17.99 it marks a return to form for a genre that looked almost dead only a few months ago.