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.







Interestingly in Lost Planet, the new Radeon performs worse than the Radeon HD 2900 XT card it's replacing and it doesn't pick up any advantages in CrossFire mode either. As the Radeon HD 2900 XT was already slower than the GeForce 8800 GT in this title, it means that there's really no competition for Nvidia's new mid-range monster in this title.