In our previous report we talked about low popularity of DirectX 10 among game developers, although that API had been around for a while. Things have been improving step by step since then. There have been at least two remarkable releases one of which claims to be regarded as a masterpiece, and a few new projects with support of DirectX 10 have been announced.

We still think that the user who?s planning to buy a new DirectX 10 compliant graphics card has the right to know what to expect from the purchase in terms of gameplay realism as well as performance. After all, however interesting a game may be and however optimized its engine is, the game is practically useless if the gamer has a slideshow instead of a smooth gameplay on the graphics card he has.

You should be aware that this depends not only on game engine optimizations and even not on the technical characteristics of the graphics card. Modern GPUs have a very complex architecture. Particularly, the latest products from the former ATI Technologies, currently the graphics department of Advanced Micro Devices, are based on the VLIW principle (Very Long Instruction Word). And it depends on the driver, especially when it comes to advanced DirectX 10 capabilities, how efficiently the computing resources of such GPUs are utilized. In other words, performance of such graphics cards in games depends heavily on the driver and may be improved with newer driver versions, making results of earlier tests inadequate. Moreover, the speed of a card in the final version of a game may differ greatly from what it did in the demo version while gamers are interested in the final version of each game, of course.

Considering the release of new drivers and new applications that make use of Microsoft?s new graphics API, and that there have appeared final versions of the games we used in our earlier tests, we now want to return to the problem of performance of modern graphics cards in DirectX 10 applications.

We added two demo versions of PT Boats: Knights of the Sea and World in Conflict to the Call of Juarez DX10 demo we used earlier. And besides a full version of Company of Heroes we tested full versions of shooters BioShock and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition . We?ll dwell upon the two latter games in the next sections.