Lost Planet 2: DX9 vs. DX11

After personally comparing the screenshots on the previous page to each other, I found myself becoming a little underwhelmed, because in some of these shots, the differences are almost negligible. And in some cases, gamers may not even be able to pick which mode they prefer since the differences just don’t stand out enough. Strangely enough, it turns out that our screenshots pale in comparison to some that NVIDIA provided us, so for the sake of showing the true vision of DX9 vs. DX11, here they are:

DirectX 9	DirectX 11

As you can see, the differences seen here are much more obvious. Why we didn’t see such stark differences in our own tests, we’re unsure. We can hope that when the final game launches, there will be just as much of an extreme difference, because it’s without question that DirectX 11 mode reigns supreme here.

To give a better example of DX9 vs. DX11 “Low” vs. DX11 “High”, we recorded the benchmark on all three and compiled them into a video. Please note that like our personal screenshots on the previous page, the differences are going to be difficult to spot. We recommend viewing this video at 720p or higher in order to have an easier time at spotting the differences.

We couldn’t wrap up this article without a quick look at performance, so let’s do that. Our benchmark machine consists of a Core i7-975 processor overclocked to 4GHz, Gigabyte’s EX58-EXTREME motherboard, 12GB of Corsair DOMINATOR memory and a Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 hard drive. We recorded the FPS with the help of FRAPS since the benchmarking mode doesn’t supply a minimum FPS.

It’s clear why NVIDIA poked us to test out Lost Planet 2, because its GF100-based card struts its DX11 muscle here quite noticeably. The GTX 480 is the faster card all-around to begin with, but its with the DX11 modes when it really pulls ahead. It will be interesting to see how AMD’s upcoming “Southern Island” series of HD 6000 cards will compete against NVIDIA’s current fleet where DirectX 11 is concerned.

As mentioned earlier, the release date for Lost Planet 2 is currently up in the air, but whenever it does show up, we plan to take it for a spin and in all likeliness provide a proper review of the game. And, if it happens to prove worthy for benchmarking, it might just find itself in our GPU testing suite.

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