Although Lost Planet 2 is not a block buster title, we did look at the first installment when it was released back in 2007 and therefore thought that we would give the sequel a quick once over. Furthermore, this is a DirectX 11 title, and that in itself makes the game worth looking at. The first version, called “Lost Planet: Extreme Condition” which was released on December 21, 2006 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, generated quite a bit of hype due to the fact that it was the first game released to utilize DirectX 10.

However despite this we failed to find any real difference between the DX9 and DX10 modes when playing Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, other than the fact that DX10 provided significantly lower frame rates. At the time the only DX10 graphics card from ATI that we had was the Radeon HD 2900XT, while there were plenty of GeForce 8000 series cards out and about.

This time round Lost Planet 2 is not the first DirectX 11 game available and there are plenty of supporting graphics cards available from both ATI and Nvidia. Furthermore, Lost Planet 2 actually makes good use of DX11 features by including tessellation along with displacement mapping on water, bosses, and player characters. Additionally soft body compute shaders are also used on “Boss” characters and wave simulation using DirectCompute.

This performance preview looks at both DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 performance using a range of graphics cards with anti-aliasing both enabled and disabled. For testing we used the official benchmark which weighs in at almost 1GB and provides two different methods for testing GPUs.

The first option, known as “A”, is of actual gameplay and this test takes quite a lot of time to run as it tests a number of scenes. Nvidia claims that this test is not a good GPU benchmark because of its random nature and is more suited as a demonstration of what gameplay in Lost Planet 2 will look like in the full game.

They then go on to say that the alternate test, known as benchmark “B”, is designed to be a deterministic and effective GPU benchmarking tool featuring DirectX 11 elements. They said this benchmark is the tool that should be used for testing performance of competing DirectX 11-capable GPUs.

However having studied both the benchmarks we disagree and have tested using option “A” as we much prefer to measure actual gameplay. This also makes our performance preview more useful to the reader, as it will more accurately represent Lost Planet 2 performance.

Finally, it is worth noting that Lost Planet 2 is a TWIMTBP (The Way It's Meant to Be Played) title and therefore we do expect it to favor Nvidia graphics cards. That said, when using the DX11 mode we also expect that the use of tessellation will further advantage Nvidia’s latest GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards.

Hardware - Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (Overclocked @ 3.70GHz) - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - GeForce GTX 480 (1.53GB) - GeForce GTX 470 (1.28GB) - GeForce GTX 460 (1GB) - GeForce GTX 460 (768MB) - GeForce GTX 285 (1GB) - GeForce GTX 275 (896MB) - GeForce GTX 260 (896MB) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) - Radeon HD 5830 (1GB) - Radeon HD 5850 (1GB) - Radeon HD 5770 (1GB) - Radeon HD 5750 (1GB) - Radeon HD 4870 (1GB) - Radeon HD 4890 (1GB) - Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - Nvidia Forceware 258.96 - ATI Catalyst 10.7

When testing the cards using DirectX 9 with 4xAA enabled we find that the average frame rates at 1680x1050 are quite high. The old GeForce GTX 260 averaged 48fps, while the Radeon HD 4870 averaged 52fps. Something interesting about the benchmark results is the fact that the Radeon HD 4870 was found to be 16% faster than the Radeon HD 5770. More over the Radeon HD 4780 also beat the GeForce GTX 460 1GB by a single frame.

Additionally the 1GB version of the GeForce GTX 460 was 19% faster than the 768MB version,, which is also very unusual. The GeForce GTX 480 was the fastest card tested using these quality settings as it beat the Radeon HD 5870 by a 10% margin.

The findings remain quite similar at 1920x1200, though this time the Radeon HD 5870 is only able to match the performance of the GeForce GTX 470. That said the GeForce GTX 480 was only 9% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 this time. Increasing the resolution did see a sharp decline in performance for most cards, the Radeon HD 5750 for example went from an average of 42fps to just 31fps at 1920x1200, dropping 26% of its original performance.

Finally at 2560x1600 the gap between the GeForce GTX 480 and Radeon HD 5870 is closed dramatically, with the GeForce winning by a 4% margin. The GeForce GTX 460 768MB became the slowest graphics card tested, while the Radeon HD 5750 was just a single frame faster. Most of the graphics cards struggled at this resolution, with the Radeon HD 5870 and GeForce GTX 480 being the only real standouts.

Now when running Lost Planet 2 in the DX11 mode we see a massive reduction in performance, even with anti-aliasing disabled. The Radeon HD 5770 managed just 24fps at 1680x1050, then 21fps at 1920x1200 and finally just 16fps at 2560x1600. However the ATI flagship single GPU card, the Radeon HD 5870, also struggled and with just 34fps at 1920x1200 it was slower than even the GeForce GTX 460 768MB.

Interestingly, while we saw a huge gap separating the 1GB and 768MB versions of the GeForce GTX 460 when testing with DX9, there is almost nothing separating them when benchmarking in the DX11 mode. The GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards were the most dominant in this test, and they were the only cards that were able to deliver perfectly playable performance in our opinion.

Now with 4x anti-aliasing enabled in the DirectX 11 mode we are testing with the highest possible in-game quality settings. As a result we found that most DirectX 11 cards were wiped out, and even the Radeon HD 5870 was unable to deliver acceptable performance at 1680x1050 with an average of just 29fps. The GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 were the only standout cards in this test, though with an average of just 48fps at 1920x1200 even the GeForce GTX 480 is struggling here.

First and foremost this is just a performance preview and we are yet to test the full version of the game, and secondly ATI has not had a chance to update their drivers to better support this title and again it has not yet been released so this is not surprising.

It was interesting to note that when testing using DX9 the Radeon HD 5000 series faired very well. That said, there were still quite a few anomalies such as the massive performance gap between the 768MB and 1GB version of the GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards or the performance margin between the Radeon HD 5770 and 4870.

Still, the performance at 1920x1200 when playing Lost Planet 2 using DirectX 9 was pretty good, with the mid-range cards all rendering over 40fps. However using the same settings in the DX11 environment hammered performance. The GeForce GTX 480 dropped 35% of its original performance and the GTX 470 lost 41% of its DX9 performance. The GeForce GTX 460 saw a similar performance loss as it dropped 39% of its original performance.

However it was the ATI cards that suffered the most, as the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 for example were both 57% slower once running in the DX11 mode. This all leads to the real question, is Lost Planet 2 that much better when using DirectX 11 opposed to DirectX 9?

Again this is not something we feel can be answered until we play the full version of the game. Something we did notice when running the stand-alone benchmark was that DX11 made very little difference when looking at benchmark A, which looks more at actual game play that can be expected from Lost Planet 2.

The second test, which Nvidia were pushing for us to test with, focuses on aspects of the game that benefit the most from the DX11 enhancements such as the bosses. If you look at the screen shots featured on the “Visual Quality Comparison” page of this article you will notice that the most significant improvements can be seen when looking at the water effects and the detail of the bosses.

While the bosses for example look even more menacing in DirectX 11, the actual environment remains much the same with no real changes. At this stage we believe for the most part the gamer will not see much difference between DX11 and DX9 when playing Lost Planet 2. Again we are only speculating based on what we have seen from the stand-alone benchmark, but already it appears that the performance hit delivered by DirectX 11 may not be worth it in Lost Planet 2.