Hellgate: London

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 2nd November 2007
Comments (17) Stumble

Return of the Ugly

One of the other things to bear in mind about Hellgate: London is that it’s a DirectX 10 game, though it still runs in Windows XP and with a DirectX 9 card. See the screenshots throughout this article? They were all taken in DirectX 9. That was done for two reasons – firstly, because most everyone is still using XP and that’s what the game will look like for them and secondly because the game has problems with our screen capture software in DX10.

So, what does DirectX 10 mode give you if you’re one of the few with a high-powered rig? Well, frankly not a lot.

Switching to DirectX 10 unlocks a few extra options, such as DX10 smoke and an Extreme Shader Quality level, but that’s about it. We did some checking between screenshots and game footage and, from what we could see, the textures and models were not dramatically different.

Worse, the settings which were added in didn’t seem to add anything really new to the game. DX10 Smoke looks thicker and blacker, but also jerkier, while the game design meant that there wasn’t anywhere we could really assess the quality of shader effects – no large bodies of water or really impressive heat-haze. There are a few other things enabled by DX10, such as some rudiementry depth of field effects and volumetric smoke and fog as well as soft-particles, but mostly they did little to actually enhance the look of the game. Motion blur on the other hand is one of the effects which is much nicer to look at and it's handled quite well in the game and the soft particles are pretty nice.

Hellgate: London DirectX 10 and beyond Hellgate: London DirectX 10 and beyond
DX9 smoke(left) and DX10 smoke (right), click to enlarge

A key place to look here in these pictures is at the way the smoke is interacting with the floor. In DX10 the smoke interacts with the environment more and looks a lot more natural and nice, but in DX9 the smoke looks like it's clipping with the floor a lot and producing a banding effect. Pointing this out is fairly moot though - you either can do DX10 or you can't and if you can then you'll do it no matter what we say just to justify your uber-GPU. Good for you, go for it.

Of course, graphics aren’t everything and Hellgate has classicly structured and nicely done gameplay in spades, but it seems to us that if you’re going to include the option of using DirectX 10 then you may as well make it worth it. Maybe that’s something that’ll get addressed in the updates for subscribers, but we can’t really speculate on that.

Texture Detail

The textures in Hellgate: London are another cause for concern as they can by no means be considered high quality, even when switched to the highest setting. The textures are blurriness incarnate at some points, though granted the lighting in some of the tube tunnels does make it look quite good at some points.

Still, don’t take my word for it – check the screenshots below.

Hellgate: London DirectX 10 and beyond Hellgate: London DirectX 10 and beyond Hellgate: London DirectX 10 and beyond
Texture detail High (left), Medium (center) and Low (right), click to enlarge

This setting baffled me completely. No matter which setting I put the game to I couldn’t really spot a difference. I did check the textures on the characters too, but there still wasn’t a massive difference.

In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter which setting you use in the realms of texture detail – whichever way you do it you’ll get the same look and I have no reason why. My advice would be to just set it to low if you can’t spot the difference either – maybe you’ll get some extra FPS as a consequence.

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