BioShock

Publisher: 2K Games

BioShock was one of the best games to be released last year and is a ‘genetically enhanced’ first person shooter set in an underwater city called Rapture. The city was created at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean by a man named Andrew Ryan as part of an ideological dream and is focused around a beautifully crafted 1930’s art-deco style.

2K Boston and 2K Australia have licensed and used Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 to great effect and have incorporated several DirectX 10 effects. These are all controlled via the ‘DirectX 10 Detail Surfaces’ option in the game’s graphics control panel.

As the game is based entirely under water, the developer has made great use of water shaders and, from what we have been told by 2K Games, there were two artists that worked only on making the water look truly stunning. The developers have used DirectX 10 to improve the water ripples when characters move through the water and there is massive use of pixel shaders to create wet-looking objects and surfaces.

Additionally, the DX10 version of the game uses the back depth buffer in order to create ‘soft’ particle effects; this is where the particle effects interact with their surroundings and overall look more realistic. There are other improvements to the game’s engine too – the developers have used DirectX 10’s DCF + texel offsets to improve shadow map filtering, which results in better-defined shadow edges.

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.

We set the image quality slider to ‘high’, leaving global lighting and Vsync disabled. Anisotropic filtering was set to 16x in the game’s configuration files and, currently, Unreal Engine 3 does not support anti-aliasing under DirectX 10 mode. The game was patched to version 1.1.





BioShock is a title where the GeForce 9600 GT’s performance characteristics are switched upside down, as it’s now quite considerably slower than the Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 cards—and the gap increases with resolution, too (from five and ten percent at 1680x1050 to over 25 and 32 percent at 2560x1600).

Like the 3870, the GeForce 8800 GT is over 20 percent faster than the 9600 GT at lower resolutions, and then it’s almost 30 percent faster at 2560x1600. On the other hand, the GeForce 8800 GS is about 10 percent slower than the 9600 GT and that shows the game isn’t limited by the size of the 8800 GS’s on-board memory size.

What it does appear to show though is that the game is quite shader intensive and there’s quite a considerable performance difference between the 8800 GT and 9600 GT. Of course, that could be down to the fact that we’re not testing with anti-aliasing enabled—and therefore the GeForce 8800 GT isn’t memory bandwidth limited—but it’s a sign of what might happen in the future when games are more shader bound than now.