BioShock

Publisher: 2K Games

BioShock was one of the best games to be released last year and is a ‘genetically enhanced’ first person shooter set in an underwater city called Rapture. The city was created at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean by a man named Andrew Ryan as part of an ideological dream and is focused around a beautifully crafted 1930’s art-deco style.

2K Boston and 2K Australia have licensed and used Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 to great effect and have incorporated several DirectX 10 effects. These are all controlled via the ‘DirectX 10 Detail Surfaces’ option in the game’s graphics control panel.

As the game is based entirely under water, the developer has made great use of water shaders and, from what we have been told by 2K Games, there were two artists that worked only on making the water look truly stunning. The developers have used DirectX 10 to improve the water ripples when characters move through the water and there is massive use of pixel shaders to create wet-looking objects and surfaces.

Additionally, the DX10 version of the game uses the back depth buffer in order to create ‘soft’ particle effects; this is where the particle effects interact with their surroundings and overall look more realistic. There are other improvements to the game’s engine too – the developers have used DirectX 10’s DCF + texel offsets to improve shadow map filtering, which results in better-defined shadow edges.

As there is no in-built benchmarking utility, we have used FRAPS to record framerate over the course of three 90 second manual runthroughs in the Neptune's Bounty level. We averaged the three average frame rates recorded by FRAPS, but reported the median low framerate instead of the average in order to weed out the outliers.

We set the image quality slider to ‘high’, leaving global lighting and Vsync disabled. Anisotropic filtering was set to 16x in the game’s configuration files and, currently, Unreal Engine 3 does not support anti-aliasing under DirectX 10 mode. The game was patched to version 1.1.





Despite its failings in other titles, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 delivers some impressive average frame rates at both 1680x1050 and 1920x1200, but it's let down by some comparatively very low minimum frame rates. The card's performance drops away fairly significantly at 2560x1600 though and the GeForce 9800 GX2 stretches out a decent performance advantage.

Not only that, but it's also considerably faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB SLI configuration again. Nvidia hasn't really been specific on the performance advancements made between the GeForce 9800 GX2 and the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB SLI configurations, but I can't quite believe that an almost 30 percent performance differential can be made up with a driver drop—at least not in a game that's been out for a relatively long time.