BioShockThis latest game based on the Unreal 3 engine has been getting rave reviews for delivering an immersive first person shooter experience. We only played the demo so far, you crash land with your plane near and underwater city and explore the depths of it for coming 20 or so gameplay hours. The art style and details really make this “shooter” stand out from the rest, and with a gripping story will have you playing it for hours on end.
Due to time constraints we only got a chance to test Leadtek 8500 GT DDR3 with this game, but seeing as overall this card is 40% faster in all benchmarks done so far, we don’t expect much difference here. What we will focus on is at what detail you can play BioShock with this low end sub €100 video card.
Our resolution of choice was 1024x768, anything lower it becomes too blurry, higher resulted in a slide show experience. The in-game details were set to Low/Medium/High for the tests:
The High setting is most taxing as it enables real time reflection for water and high detail shaders, both these settings cause quite a difference in image quality, but not as big as going from medium to low, which we though was really “too blank” looking to be really enjoyable. Here are few comparison screenshots, showing high/med/low setting top to bottom:
We used FRAPS to log minimum and average frame rates, the benchmark was started at the beginning of the game when you drop in the water, until your capsule enters the city right before the loading screen. These are the results:
At low quality setting the results are encouraging, 40FPS average with dips to 20fps. Medium Quality setting takes a large toll, a 46% drop in performance; ouch! High quality is completely unplayable. Luckily when you overclock the FPS rise enough at Medium Quality to strike a nice balance between visual quality and smooth gameplay. All in all, for a low end VGA card, the results are far from bad.
Onto power consumption, noise and temperatures ->