A while back, we took an extensive look at demos of the highly anticipated PC game Crysis, and compared video of the Windows XP version running DirectX9 to the new Windows Vista version running DX10 (see the THG video on Crysis). We looked at recorded video of actual gameplay demos from E3 2006 and CES 2007, and after careful examination of the footage, it occurred to us that both versions looked amazing. It was extremely tough to tell - both during gameplay and while watching the recorded video later on - which version had the better graphics.

There is good news and bad news in this, of course. The good news is that Crytek appears to have designed an incredibly beautiful game that looks just as good on previous generation software. Thus, the majority of PC gamers, who are still running Windows XP with DX9, can rejoice in the comfort that they will likely not miss out on much if they refrain from upgrading to Windows Vista. Now the bad news: is DX10 all that it's cracked up to be?

View Lost Planet: Extreme Condition DX10 Slide Show (32 images)

We put in an extensive amount of gameplay time on two recently released PC game demos - Capcom's Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, and Call of Juarez - to see if the DX10 versions truly delivered the next-generation clarity and realism that gamers have been waiting for. The short answer is "yes," but the improvements are small, and it will take a keen eye and a real appreciation for graphics detail to tell the difference between the DX9 and DX10 versions. Lost Planet boasts exquisitely designed animation and superior graphics on both the original Xbox 360 version and the new PC port, which we tested on a brand new Dell XPS 720 H2C system in the Tom's Hardware lab.

Here are the specs: the XPS 720 runs Windows Vista Ultimate on an Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core platform (2.93 GHz) with two SLI-enabled Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra cards; the XPS system also had an Ageia PhysX card (though neither the Lost Planet or Call of Juarez demos were compatible). For more information about this model and its benchmark results, check out the full review on Gear Digest. For the display, we used a Samsung SyncMaster 226BW 22-inch display.

Now for the tests: Capcom was gracious enough to have a performance test application embedded in the Lost Planet demo, which made things a bit easier. The PC settings for demo were easy to adjust to one's likings, but we started off the test on the demo's default settings: HDR at medium, shadow quality at medium, shadow resolution at default, multi-GPU turned off, and a display resolution of 1280x720. In addition, we had the system's SLI disabled to start off with We did this for a couple reasons; first, the Dell's Nvidia control panel had SLI disabled at its default setting, and second, enabling SLI was completely useless without downloading Nvidia's recent SLI driver for DX10.

The first batch of performance tests were unfortunately lacklustre, considering the formidable hardware setup running the demo. The Lost Planet performance test is divided into two sections: a snow level which features outdoor environments with swirling snow flurries and enemy creatures, and a cave level that shows clusters of flying creatures. The default test at a resolution of 1280x720 delivered an average frame rate of 73 FPS in the snow, and 84 FPS in the cave. When we kicked up the screen resolution to a maximum of 1600x1000, the frames rates declined noticeably: 49 FPS in the snow and 66 in the cave. (Disclaimer: the performance tests were run several times on each setting and sometimes would present slightly different results.) While the initial default results weren't terrible, I was hoping to see frame rates closer to 100 FPS right out of the gate without SLI enabled.

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