Bioshock Infinite Detail Preset Performance

From our Bioshock Infinite review :

"Your character Booker’s trip to Columbia is in the interest of retrieving a girl, Elizabeth, from captivity. It’s imperative that you find her so that you can clear a pile of debts, but it’s increasingly clear as your time in Columbia continues that this isn’t a simple hero's tale. Elizabeth has the power to control “tears in reality" that are popping up all over the city."

"It’s an adult, thoughtful and compelling work that shames many (if not most) other attempts in the medium. Bioshock Infinite is an incredibly good video game. It might be one of the best.

We use the handy in-built benchmarking tool to run a timedemo from two sections near the start of the game. However, we've found the game-generated results to be unreliable, so use FRAPS to record the frame rate over a 40 second sequence of gameplay during the second test. The results taken are an average of three repeated tests.



With Ultra detail and depth of field enabled, the GTX 680 2GB and HD 7970 3GB GHz Edition are almost cynically matched, with the GTX 680's minimum frame rate of 66fps just 2fps higher than that of the Radeon. At reduced detail settings the AMD architecture looks to have the edge though. At Very high detail, despite an identical average frame rate of 109fps, the 7970's minimum frame rate of 97fps is 10 fps higher than that of the GeForce.

Scaling down the detail settings, just disabling depth of field improves the frame rate by 16 per cent, while the drop down to Very High from Ultra improves the frame rate by 19 per cent on the AMD card and 12 per cent on the Nvidia. The High and medium preset perform very similarly, with the latter improving frame rates by over 50 per cent in comparison to the Ultra preset. Finally, the Very Low preset, which disabled self-shadowing, sees frame rates skyrocket, with the Radeon some 20 per cent quicker than the GeForce. The overall difference between the Ultra w.DOF and Very low present is a huge 212 per cent on the GTX 680 and over 250 per cent on the Radeon.