Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

Publisher: Capcom

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition was the first game to receive DirectX 10 treatment and at the time the differences between DX9 and DX10 modes weren't that dramatic - at least, not dramatic enough to capture in a screenshot. However, the developers have been hard at work since its launch and a patch was rolled out in August that not only improved DirectX 10 performance, but also improved image quality.

The developers managed to improve performance through some code optimisation, and considering this is a part of the The Way It's Meant To Be Played programme, they probably came with the help of Nvidia's developer support team and tools.

With thanks to the geometry shader, DirectX 10 now brings a more realistic motion blur effect, along with depth of field and a DirectX 10 fur shader. Both the motion blur and the fur shader look significantly better than the DirectX 9.0 versions and show that, with a little bit of time, DirectX 10 can bring some noticeable improvements in image quality.

For our performance testing, we used the game's built-in performance test and recorded the frame rate from the 'snow' portion of the demo. All of the game's details were pushed up to their highest values, with shadow quality, filter quality and fur quality set to 'DX10'. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering was controlled from within the game, while vsync was disabled at all times.






Being an Xbox 360 game first and foremost, Lost Planet doesn't require massively high frame rates to be enjoyable and, during our own gameplay sessions, we've found that around 30 frames per second is more than enough to enjoy the game. Enabling 4xAA reduces performance quite a bit on the BFG Tech GeForce 8800 GT OC, but not so much that it renders the game completely unplayable at 1680x1050, but you'd be better sticking to 0xAA if you want to play at 1920x1200 unless you want to start disabling some of the DirectX 10 effects that this game incorporates.

The GeForce 8800 GTX is considerably faster than the GeForce 8800 GT in this title. Interestingly though, the BFG Tech card didn't really draw out a massive lead over the reference card, such that you're again probably not going to notice the increased performance during gameplay.