Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Lost Planet is one of the first games to use DirectX 10, and it has a DirectX 9 mode, as well, so we can do some direct comparisons. DX9 and DX10 are more or less indistinguishable from one another visually in this game, as far as I can tell. They both look gorgeous, though. This is one very good looking game, with subtle HDR lighting and a nifty motion-blur effect.

We tested by manually playing through a specific portion of the game and recording frame rates with FRAPS. Each gameplay sequence lasted 90 seconds, and we recorded five separate sequences per graphics card. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

We tested with fairly high quality settings. The game's various quality options were set to "high" with the exception of shadow quality and shadow resolution, which were set to "medium." 4X antialiasing and 16X anisotropic filtering were enabled.

We did hit one snag in the DX10 version of Lost Planet. The Radeon HD cards didn't appear to be applying anisotropic filtering to most surfaces, regardless of whether aniso was enabled in the game settings or forced on via Catalyst Control Center. Be aware of that as you're looking at the results.

The move to more and faster memory doesn't seem to help the Radeon HD 2900 XT much at all. The 1GB GDDR4 card is only slightly faster than the 512MB one, if at all. That leaves the 1GB just ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTS and trailing the GeForce 8800 GTX in the DX9 version of Lost Planet. The situation grows more acute in DX10, where the 1GB GDDR4 card falls behind the 8800 GTX. Every config we tested suffered a performance drop with DX10, though.

CrossFire isn't effective with either version of DirectX. I tried setting Catalyst A.I. to "Advanced" in order to force on alternate frame rendering, but it didn't help. The game still ran fine, but it wasn't any faster. I also ran into an odd problem, with or without CrossFire, where Lost Planet's main menu was exceptionally slow, to the point of being almost unusable, on the Radeons. This problem only seemed to affect the DX9 version of the game, for whatever reason.

Before we move on, I'd like to take a quick look at performance without antialiasing. I explained in my Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 series review that AMD's new GPUs use their shader cores to handle the resolve stage of multisampled antialiasing, something we didn't know when we first reviewed the 2900 XT. The question is: how does this limitation impact performance? I figured Lost Planet's DX9 version would be an interesting place to have a look. Here's what I found.

Without antialiasing, the Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB GDDR4 is outright faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX, its direct competition. When we enable 4X AA, though, the Radeon's performance dips precipitously, by 24%. By comparison, the 8800 GTX only suffers a 6% drop. Of course, we're not likely to want to run without at least 4X AA when using a $400-500 graphics card, which is the whole problem. Store that away somewhere as you think about why the Radeon HD series hasn't entirely lived up to its potential.