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3D Performance with Lost Planet Demo: DirectX 10 Benchmarks May 16, 2007 |
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Summary: Wondering how the Lost Planet demo performs in DirectX 10? What about DirectX 9? In this article we go over the differences between the DX9 and DX10 versions of the Lost Planet demo, as well as exploring the game's performance with the latest high-end cards from AMD and NVIDIA. How does the Radeon HD 2900 XT perform in this game? What about the GeForce 8800 Ultra? Is NVIDIA's Vista performance improving, or is WinXP still faster? You may be surprised by the results!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 9 ) |
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For months now we’ve been patiently waiting for any type of game or application that could be used to give us a clue how today’s DirectX 10 hardware looks and performs with the games of tomorrow. That’s why on Monday when we heard that Capcom was releasing a DirectX 10 demo for Lost Planet, we immediately downloaded and booted it up. We’ve been testing it ever since.
If you recall our DirectX 10 preview article from last year, there are two schools of thought on how game developers are going to integrate DirectX 10 into games. On one hand, due to its greater efficiency, DirectX 10 can be used to deliver performance improvements. Before Windows Vista and DirectX 10 were released, Microsoft frequently referred to performance improvements of up to 6X (!) that of DirectX 9 hardware running on Windows XP thanks to new state objects which help to reduce overhead.
Towards the end of our DX10 article with spoke with Epic’s Tim Sweeney; Tim confirmed to us that this was the direction they were leaning towards for Unreal Engine 3: “ Unreal Engine 3 will make full use of DirectX 10, and many of our and our partners' games will ship in 2007 with full support for DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. But, despite the marketing hype, DirectX 10 isn't all that different from DirectX 9, so you'll mainly see performance benefits on DirectX 10 rather than striking visual differences.”
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If developers want to go in a different direction however, these performance enhancements gleaned from DirectX 10 could then be used to deliver better graphics. For instance, in an outdoor environment like a forest the developer could add dozens of extra objects – additional layers of clouds, vegetation, birds, etc. Referring back to our interview with Crytek’s Cevat Yerli earlier this year, this is exactly what Crytek plans to do with their upcoming shooter Crysis: “DX10 simply allows us to increase the visual quality of the shaders and particle effects, to the degree that some features are DX10 only. The hardware performance is a generation above DX9 so that there is a major gain in frames per second. Both versions of the game play are exactly the same though, while in Multiplayer we are evaluating technologies that may benefit gameplay in DX10 to finally enrich that PvP experience to a new level. Given the host of improvements Windows Vista offers for gamers though, we would recommend upgrading as soon as possible.”
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So which direction has Capcom chosen to go with for Lost Planet? We received the following answer from Capcom when we asked them directly:
In general, the PC version has a higher resolution the gamer renders at. It also supports ambient occlusion and parallax mapping, which means all the footsteps and other individual effects are cleaner. We are also not using a reduction buffer, meaning that the graphical special effects are also cleaner on the PC. Because of the multithreaded nature of the engine from the very start, it is quite fast.
The upside of DX10 for Lost Planet is the stream-out function and geometry shaders which allow us to make the engine run faster. The major difference between DirectX 9 and 10 is primarily related to this speed. Compared to DX9, our use of geometry shader, depth resolve and stream output should provide a 10% to 20% boost in frame rate as driver optimization progresses. One of the immediate differences you can see in the DX10 version is the clean edges on shadows; however the main difference is obviously the speed at which the engine renders as mentioned before.
Based on this, it sounds like DX10 is being used primarily for performance gains, although they also mention cleaner edges on shadows under the DX10 code path as well. If you boot up the DX10 version of the game you’ll notice the “high quality” shadows option in the game’s menu. Under the DX9 version you’re limited to a max of medium quality shadows.
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How we tested
Lost Planet is a game that probably needs no introduction, but we’ll provide a quick recap for those of you who may not have heard of it anyway. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is set in the frozen wasteland of E.D.N. III. The planet has limited resources and very nasty native inhabitants known as the Akrid, an insect-like race of aliens that don’t like the new two-legged visitors on their planet. Eventually the humans figured out that the Akrid contained a thermal energy source inside their body that could be used to provide both heat and energy. This energy is vital to your health in the game: instead of relying on a traditional health meter Lost Planet has a thermal energy indicator.
The thermal energy indicator is constantly draining, take a hit and your thermal energy drains even faster. Each time you kill an Akrid however they leave behind thermal energy which you can collect. This keeps the pace of the game flowing, take too much time going nowhere and you’ll eventually run out of thermal energy.
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In the game you’ll play as the character Wayne. You wake up with amnesia, all you remember is that your father was killed by an Akrid known as the Green Eye. You set out to find Green Eye and kill him.
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Capcom’s demo includes a built-in performance test. We used this test to evaluate the performance of the DX10 codepath versus the performance of the DX9 codepath. We conducted our DX9 tests under both Windows XP and Windows Vista to see if the added overhead introduced by the Vista OS affected performance. All of these DX9 versus DX10 tests were run with a GeForce 8800 Ultra, the fastest card on the market right now.
Let’s take a look at those results shall we?
| DX9 vs DX10 Performance | Page:: ( 2 / 9 ) |
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…
| DX9 vs DX10 Performance (cont’d) | Page:: ( 3 / 9 ) |
Lost Planet – Direct3D
Notes
Even under the greater demands of high quality HDR lighting, the DX9 version of Lost Planet ran faster than the DX10 version. It looks like for now at least, the DX9 version is the way to go. NVIDIA and Capcom have a little over a month to get this fixed though.
Now that we’ve determined that the DX9 version is faster, we’re now curious to see how the various high-end cards stack up to one another – can a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS cards outperform GeForce 8800 Ultra? How do the Radeon X1950 XTX and GeForce 7900 GTX compare to the newer DX10 GeForce 8800 and Radeon HD cards? These were the types of questions we set out to answer.
| System Setup | Page:: ( 4 / 9 ) |
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard
2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
HD2900_xp_8-37-4-070419a-046506E
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
Catalyst 7.4
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT
ForceWare 93.71
ASUS EN8800 GTS 320MB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB
ForceWare 158.22
300GB Western Digital Caviar SE
Windows XP Professional SP2
Windows Vista Ultimate x86 (32-bit)
Notes
One very common problem a lot of people seem to be running into with the Lost Planet demo is the "failure to find xinput1_3.dll" error message. If you happen to run into this problem, or any other Direct3D error message, make sure you have the most up-to-date DirectX redistributable installed (even if you’re running Windows Vista).
All further testing was conducted with the DX9 version of Lost Planet. We cranked all the game’s settings up to their highest levels, with the exception of HDR lighting, which we left at “medium” for the GeForce 8800 and Radeon HD 2900 XT cards, and “low” for the GeForce 7900 GTX/7950 GT and Radeon X1950 XTX.
Rather than rely on the built-in performance demo, we booted up the hive infiltration mission from the demo and recorded frame rates with FRAPS.
| Lost Planet 0xAA/16xAF Performance | Page:: ( 5 / 9 ) |
Lost Planet – Direct3D
| Lost Planet Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 46 | 53 |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 40 | 48 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB | 28 | 32 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB | 27 | 32 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 15 | 19 |
| GeForce 7950 GT | 12 | 17 |
| Radeon HD 2900 XT | 30 | 36 |
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Notes
We were unable to test the Radeon X1950 XTX at 1600x1200. For whatever reason that resolution wasn’t provided in the game’s menu. In addition, we were unable to test the older GeForce and Radeon cards at higher resolutions. The game has a built-in feature that determines what your current frame rate is. If your frame rate dips below a certain level, it automatically stops the game and asks you to lower your graphics settings. This is what prevented us from getting scores for the GeForce 7950 GT at 1920x1200, and all three cards at 2560x1600.
As you can see, the GeForce 8800 Ultra comes out on top in the overall performance testing, although that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone by now. The GeForce 8800 GTX trails by 13% at 1600x1200 and the Radeon HD 2900 XT finishes 24% behind the GTX. The GeForce 8800 GTS cards perform very similarly at the lower resolutions, only at 2560x1600 does the 640MB card begin to pull away.
| 4xAA/16xAF Performance | Page:: ( 6 / 9 ) |
Lost Planet – Direct3D
| Lost Planet Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 42 | 50 |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 37 | 42 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB | 27 | 30 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB | 21 | 25 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 13 | 17 |
| GeForce 7950 GT | 9 | 16 |
| Radeon HD 2900 XT | 29 | 36 |
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Notes
Under 4xAA we lose the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB at 2560x1600. The board just doesn’t have enough memory to keep the GPU fed with data and the frame rate drops so low that the built-in performance tool stops the game and tells us to lower our graphics settings in order to proceed.
The Radeon HD 2900 XT continues to hold an edge over the GeForce 8800 GTS. At 1600x1200 the margin is 11% -- that’s probably on par with what a factory overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB card would do. The GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra continue to hold a comfortable lead over all the other DX10 cards.
| 16xCSAA/16xAF Performance | Page:: ( 7 / 9 ) |
Lost Planet – Direct3D
| Lost Planet Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 39 | 45 |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 34 | 40 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB | 24 | 28 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB | 20 | 24 |
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| SLI Performance | Page:: ( 8 / 9 ) |
Lost Planet – Direct3D
| Lost Planet Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | 42 | 50 |
| GeForce 8800 GTX | 37 | 42 |
| GeForce 8800 GTX SLI | 61 | 68 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB | 27 | 30 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB SLI | 45 | 51 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB | 21 | 25 |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB SLI | 26 | 33 |
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Notes
The Lost Planet demo doesn’t support SLI out of the box. We managed to get it to work though by manually forcing AFR mode 1 via the ForceWare control panel. We couldn’t get the GeForce 7 cards to run under any of the AFR modes without seeing lots of visual corruption. You can also see that the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB SLI setup didn’t seem to scale as well as the 640MB card.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 9 / 9 ) |
As a testament to how well the Radeon HD 2900 XT ran the Lost Planet demo, all our screenshots from page 1 of this article were taken on a 2900 XT card.
Of course, the bulk of our performance testing (including the Radeon HD 2900 XT scores) was conducted under the game’s DX9 code path, but as we showed you on pages two and three, the DX9 version of the Lost Planet demo is running the fastest right now. Capcom’s ultimate goal is for the DX10 version of Lost Planet to run 10-20% faster than DX9, but right now the opposite is the case, at least with NVIDIA’s current driver. Hopefully by the time the final game is released at the end of next month NVIDIA’s driver team will have the DX10 GeForce driver better optimized for the game. As it stands now though their DX9 driver is a little faster.
When it comes to NVIDIA’s Vista driver, clearly they have made improvements. Whereas a few months ago NVIDIA’s Vista driver was considerably slower than their WinXP driver, in our testing today with Lost Planet, NVIDIA’s DX9 driver under Vista was running neck-and-neck with their Windows XP driver.
SLI support still needs to be implemented. We had to force SLI manually via the control panel in order for the GeForce 8800 cards to scale properly in Lost Planet. We couldn’t get GeForce 7 cards like the GeForce 7900 GTX to run with SLI no matter what we tried.
Overall though, things are looking promising on the DX10 gaming front. We’ve got Capcom’s Lost Planet coming in a little over a month, and many more games after that will be released over the course of this summer. PC gamers will also be thrilled to hear that Capcom has updated the game’s eye candy so that it will look a little better than the Xbox 360 version. We can’t wait to get our hands on the final game once it’s released.
We hear the game has built-in support for multi-threading too. Sounds like another article to us!