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Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

New DirectX, new visuals?

"That's all great," I can hear you saying, "but what about the graphics?" OK: visuals are well-done; the carnage in Lost Planet – explosions, violent enemy dismemberments and alien-on-alien violence – reminds me of the Serious Sam games. Great audio accents the game's free-for-all theme too but my only complaint is the sheer whiteness of the outdoor areas. Yes, I know it's a cold and barren world, but it's also a pretty bland theme. To the game's credit, the weather effects are quite authentic, and the colorful alien life brings contrast to the white-out.

There are plenty of fine-grained graphics options to set, but no option to use EAX or OpenAL hardware audio acceleration. Video resolution choices are odd too: the popular HDTV resolutions are accounted for, but there are some that I've never seen before, such as 1600x1000 and 1024x576. These oddball resolutions could easily be ignored if it weren't for the omission of several popular PC resolutions, such as 1280x1024, 1440x900 and 1650x1080.

The numerous detail and tweaking settings will no doubt appeal to the PC gamer.

So can you set everything to high, even with a spangly new DX10 graphics card?

With the caveat that Capcom promises improved performance in the final release, here are some numbers. I averaged 31 FPS in the demo's "Performance Test" at 1920x1200 with default settings, and 36 FPS at 1600x1200. Disabling antialiasing altogether gave about 10 FPS headroom at both resolutions. The test computer is no slouch, and I saw some jerkiness in frame rate which caused noticeable hitching. It's likely that those with mid-range PCs will have to move most graphics options down to "Medium" or "Low" to achieve a smooth, constant frame rate.

I put the DirectX 10 version of the demo through its paces under Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. The menus, options and gameplay are unchanged from the DirectX 9 version, with the exception of some antialiasing options which are only available on Vista with NVIDIA's latest drivers. I played at both 1920x1200 and 1600x1200, and frame rates were right in line with the DirectX 9 version. In fact, at lower resolutions where the 8800GTX wasn't limited by the CPU speed, the DirectX 10 version was 5 – 10 FPS faster. Hitching, however, was still an issue; exacerbated when there's lots of action on the screen. I expected to be completely in awe of the improved visuals promised by the new API, but the differences are more subtle.

This sequence of DX10 shots shows...

...that the visual differences are very subtle in places.

Lost Planet does make use of the new features available in Direct3D 10, including Shader Model 4.0 and geometry shaders. Shadows are softer and more realistic, and the edges of buildings and other objects blend into the scenery rather than intersect at perfect right angles. Even footprints in the snow have real depth to them. New shader techniques do wonders for the games' models; there's less of the wax-figure look which defined the DirectX 9 era. Overall, the environment is more organic and less manufactured; moving from the DirectX 10 version back to the DirectX 9 version highlights the differences. Given the short time frame in which Capcom has prepared this release, I'm duly impressed. Still, I'm pining for the visuals promised by Crysis screenshots.

Closing thoughts

Lost Planet had a lot of associated hype prior to its initial release on the Xbox 360, complete with comparisons to Halo. Reviews for the console version, however, were mostly "Good but not great", and judging from the PC demo, I have to agree. The PC port looks fine, even using the ol' DX 9, and the levels load very quickly. It's easy to pick up and the controls are good if a bit wonky – if you have an Xbox 360 gamepad for the PC, you may prefer using it over a keyboard and mouse. Nothing about the demo makes this game a must-have, but I may give the full version a chance when its released. Then again, we're spoiled on the PC with shooters of the finest pedigree, and competing on the platform where the best shooters are born is no easy task.

I'll end this with a note for those lucky few with fresh-out-of-the box ATI R600-based cards. As reported on a number of forums, including Capcom's own site, it seems that the Lost Planet Direct X 10 demo has serious performance and visual problems with the Radeon HD 2900XT series of cards. I'm no conspiracy theorist, so I'll chalk it up as coincidence that the first DirectX 10 game has a NVIDIA marketing tie-in and also plays poorly on ATI hardware - the day after ATI's flagship DX10-capable GPU launch. On the plus side, there's no doubt the problems with 2900XT-based cards will be remedied in an imminent driver release.

Some additional differences between the PC and Xbox360 are that the former uses ambient occlusion to give surfaces a more realistic level of lighting based on how the light reflected off according to how other surfaces get in the way ("occlusion"); the PC version also uses a more pronounced use of parallax mapping and either higher resolution shadow maps or better filtering of the shadow edges - Ed.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: DirectX 10 graphics

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