Earlier today CAPCOM gave gamers the first game with both DirectX 9 and DirectX10 capabilities when they released a demo of Lost Planet for the PC. The demo was released in two separate downloads, one designed for gamers with cutting edge DX10 compatible cards and another for the vast majority of gamers still running DX9 hardware. I won’t go in to too much detail about DirectX 10 and its new capabilities, as I’m more interested in what DX10’s changes mean for gamers from both visual and performance standpoints. Keep in mind that in order to run DirectX 10 software, you’ll need both a DX10 compatible card (NVIDIA Geforce 8x00 series, or AMD Radeon HD 2x00 series) and Windows Vista, as the DirectX 10 runtime library is exclusive to Microsoft’s new operating system. While it’s still a little early to gauge the full merits of DirectX 10, these first releases will help gamers decide if it’s worth it to shell out the cash for a new video card right now, or wait for the technology to mature a bit more.

I downloaded both the DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 versions of the Lost Planet demo, and installed them on one of our machines running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. The machines specs were as follows:

• AMD Athlon X2 4400+ 2.2Ghz

• 2GB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM

• EVGA Geforce 8800 GTX 768MB

• Forceware 158.43 Beta Drivers

While certainly not the most cutting edge machine (the processor is over a year old) we’ve still had a hard time finding games to give it a run for its money, mostly thanks to the top-end graphics card. The first time I went to start the DirectX 10 version of the demo, it immediately crashed saying that it was missing some .dll files. Consulting the readme.txt didn’t help at all, but eventually I found others online having the same problem. The solution was simple enough, and required me to download the latest DirectX files from Microsoft’s official site. Once those were installed, I was good to go.

Is There a Difference?

Comparing the video options between the DirectX 10 and DirectX 9 versions doesn’t reveal too many differences. With the plethora of video options available to you, the only limitation of the DX9 version is the inability to set Shadow Quality to High – it maxes out at Medium. With just one option being different, I decided to run the two games with identical settings for an apples-to-apples quality comparison. I set all of the games quality settings to High except for Shadow Quality (I set that to Medium as that’s the highest common setting across the DX9 and DX10 versions), set the resolution to 1920x1200 to better spot any differences, and set Anti-aliasing to 4X and Texture Filtering to Anisotropic 16X. With those settings I set out to look for any visual discrepancies between the two versions of the demo.

After playing both versions for about a half an hour, it became pretty clear to me that I was better off running the DirectX 9 version of the demo. With the exact same settings the DirectX 10 version of Lost Planet ran about 10% slower, and had some visual bugs. The bugs were few and far between, but they were there. I set up a comparison screenshot for you to see the issue for yourself on the VS model. Little bugs like that are sure to be ironed out by the time the game is actually released, and it’s entirely possible it’s a driver issue instead of a game issue. Besides the performance issues and occasional bug, I found no discernable difference between the DX9 and DX10 versions of Lost Planet with the same settings. Not content with my initial findings, I decided to try out the one feature that the DirectX 10 has that the DirectX 9 version is lacking: High Quality Shadows.

Vaseline Smudged on the Lens Makes Good Shadows

After setting the Shadow Quality to High in the DX10 version I jumped back in the game and was immediately stunned. My frame rate had been cut in half! My FPS was hovering in the high teens, while before it had been pretty stable in the mid thirties. Immediately disappointed with this game-breaking performance drop (the game actually tells you it’s running too slowly and will kick you out to the menus) I decided to at least see if the High Quality Shadows were worth the tradeoff.

There’s no denying that when Shadow Quality is set to High the shadows become much softer. Instead of sharp, per-pixel shadows they’re more of a blended blob beneath you. Do they look better? Well that’s really a matter of personal preference. But if I’m deciding between softer shadows and a more stable frame rate, I’ll take the smoother frame rate any day. The shadows when set to Medium look fantastic anyway, so I really don’t think you’re missing out on much.

Benchmarks

Because CAPCOM decided to toss in a benchmarking function, I decided to take that for a spin and see what the numbers said. Just like my visual comparison, I ran both the DX9 and DX10 versions with the maximum shared settings (maxed out everything, but Shadow Quality set to Medium) to see what I came up with. After doing that, I went ahead and set the Shadow Quality to High on the DirectX 10 version and ran the test again, to really see what sort of impact the shadows have on the frame rate. The benchmark is broken up in to two parts and gives two separate FPS numbers at the end – one for the Snow segment and one for the Cave segment. Here’s the results:

• DirectX 9 (Medium Shadows): Snow 30, Cave 33

• DirectX 10 (Medium Shadows): Snow 25, Cave 31

• DirectX 10 (High Shadows): Snow 15, Cave 19

No real surprises here. Both DirectX versions looked the same with Medium Quality, but the DX10 version ran slower. Just as I experienced while playing the game, setting the Shadow Quality to High on the DirectX 10 version had a severe impact on performance, making the game practically unplayable. So is DirectX 10 really that appealing for Lost Planet?

The Bottom Line

From this initial teaser of DX10 functionality in Lost Planet, it seems pretty clear that you shouldn’t rush out to buy an 8800GTX just yet. It’s worth noting however that this is a prerelease demo, and performance and features are bound to change as we get closer to Lost Planet’s release. DirectX 10 programming is still in its infancy, so don’t be surprised if it’s a much different story by the time we get the final version of Lost Planet. CAPCOM is promising that DirectX 10 will actually run faster in the final product, as they’ll be utilizing many of the performance optimizations that Shader Model 4.0 offers over its predecessor. They haven’t gone in to detail about whether the DirectX 10 release will actually look much better than its DX9 counterpart (besides smudged shadows), but faster performance is certainly enough of a benefit if it comes true. My guess is that because NVIDIA is a partner on the development of the PC port of Lost Planet, the final release will provide all the graphical goodies we expect. NVIDIA needs titles to validate the purchase of a DirectX 10 card for gamers, and Lost Planet is being hyped enough to use it as a flagship title. For now though there really isn’t a compelling reason to want the DirectX 10 version of Lost Planet. However, it will certainly be nice to see a title taking advantage of the 8800’s capabilities when Lost Planet ships a little bit later this year.