Benchmarks – Bioshock Test 1
Bioshock is set in the underwater city of Rapture. 2K games successfully weave a gripping FPS-story around narrow tunnels and flooded rooms. As the unwitting hero, you use either weapons or plasmid-abilities with very beautiful visual effects. The graphics quality seems very similar under DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. One obvious exception is the way water is rendered, which has real waves in DirectX 10. If you’d like to learn more about Bioshock, take a look at our full review.
We benchmarked Bioshock without FSAA, since the standard drivers don’t allow us to enable it and the in-game menu lacks AA settings. It seems we will just have to get used to the fact that games that are released both for consoles and PCs don’t offer HDR-R and FSAA simultaneously (Oblivion, Bioshock).
ATI’s cards have severe problems with Bioshock. The HD 2400 and HD 2600 series crash the game reproducibly. While the scene depicting your arrival in Rapture freezes repeatedly, the plasmid intro completes without any problems. However, continue playing a little further, and the game will freeze once again. Sadly, this costs the mainstream Radeon cards several frames in the overall performance rating. According to several forums, an ATI hotfix solves several texture-related problems. The crashes remain, though. The Radeon HD 2900 XT is plagued by no such problems, running the game smoothly at the same settings using the Catalyst 7.9 driver suite.
The first benchmark scene shows the main character’s arrival in Rapture. A Geforce 8600 GT allows you to play the game at full quality settings. Starting with the Radeon 2900 XT and the Geforce 8800 GTS, the game is completely smooth even at higher resolutions. Since FSAA is not supported by the game, additional video memory offers no advantage here. We saw no speed differences between 320 MB and 640 MB or 256 MB and 512 MB. The results for the Radeon HD 2400 and HD 2600 series of cards are missing here, since the game freezes immediately and then proceeds to crash. Our recommendation: Play the game in DX9 by starting it with the –dx9 switch
totally surpised witht the 2400 & 2600 results, seems as if the only real gaming GPU from ATI is the 2900 which is not wroth getting
Gutted about these results really. My HD2900 Pro's arriving tomorrow and I really wish I'd of seen this before making that order. As I'd of gone with the 320MB 8800GTS.
But.... in ATi's favour, Ive just gone from a HD2600XT DDR4 rig in Crossfire... and that BLEW GAMES AWAY at max settings at 1680x1050 resolution... OK a few games didnt perform over 25fps... but if that crossfire setup was anything to go by, 2 X HD2900 Pros in Crossfire might be a very good and cheap alternative to the 8800GTX. Just a thought anyway
3DMARK06 Scores with 2 X HD2600XT 256MB DDR4 on 5000+ X2 CPU = 9742... My friends 8800GTX on 2.13ghz C2D Scored 10700.
if your going to get sli crossfire better going for fast single card (8800gts 640mb or even GTX before considering SLI)
Well luckily I managed to make back £220 on the sale of both of my HD2600XT's (some people pay anything!), which has paid for my HD2900 PRO and left me with £45 left over. I need to hurry up and buy my next HD2900 PRO before stocks run out. I think for £350 in total they'll do a good job. Two GPU's surely has the edge over one!
Soooo glad I got an 8800GTS 320MB. It overclocks superbly: 500MHz core to 719MHz and 1600MHz DDR memory up to 1850MHz. Gives a standard 8800GTX a good run for it's money.
Just had a closer look at some of the screenshots. No FSAA sucks. Damn that PS3!
Just had a closer look at some of the screenshots. No FSAA sucks. Damn that PS3!
I think it would be worth while re-doing the test wit the new Catalyst Driver 7.10. They made a big difference with Battlefield 2142 and now I can play Bioshock as it just crashed my system before. I am using an HD2600 Pro AGP and finally feel I got what I paid for (cheap)!!