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 gave us some strange results... in fact, they were so strange that I had to double and then triple check them because I thought that I had misconfigured something during the benchmark setup. Thankfully for the GeForce 9800 GTX, that wasn't the case and these numbers are very real.

Let's forget about the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and GeForce 9800 GX2 here - both deliver unquestionably smooth gameplay experiences right the way up to 2560x1600. No, where the interest lies is in the comparison between the GeForce 9800 GTX and the two cards that are priced either side of it - both are considerably slower. In fact, the gap between the 9800 GTX and its predecessor gets up to almost 25 percent, but in that situation the frame rates are too high for it to matter.

However, when you push the resolution all the way up to 2560x1600, both the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 and GeForce 8800 GTX are around 20 percent slower than the GeForce 9800 GTX. It would seem that BioShock is both memory bandwidth limited and shader limited to some extent... but the performance difference only appears when high shader throughput is combined with adequate memory bandwidth.