DX9 vs DX10 Performance

The Capcom performance test includes two different sequences – an outdoors demo from titled snow and a second, less-intensive demo named cave. The snow demo comes from the hive infiltration level of the game demo. It includes combat sequences and is more graphics-intensive than the cave demo. We’ve presented the performance results from both demos below:

Lost Planet – Direct3D

Notes

As you can see, the DX9 codepath currently runs faster than the DX10 version. At 1600x1200 the DX10 codepath ran 16% slower than DX9, both under Windows Vista with the GeForce 8800 Ultra in the snow demo, and 2% under the cave sequence. This is with 4xAA/16xAF enabled, and HDR lighting set to medium.

This was a bit of a surprise to us considering that the DX10 version of Lost Planet was intended to run faster than the DX9 version. It looks like a little more driver work is needed in order for that to happen.

We were curious what would happen under higher quality graphics settings though, so we cranked the HDR setting up to high. In theory with more graphically-intensive lighting the burden should shift more onto the GPU and driver inefficiencies would be less of a burden, hopefully allowing the DX10 setup to perform closer to the DX9 path. Let’s see what happened…