Is DX10 all that?
In a word...no.

NVIDIA has really done a lot to propagate DirectX 10 as the next saving grace for gaming but in reality we’re not sure that’s going to happen – at least not with the first PC title to come out to use Microsoft’s latest API. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition started off last year as an XBOX360-only title from Capcom and thanks to NVIDIA is seeing the light of day on the PC.

There’s been quite of bit of controversy over the release of this demo from the ATI camp – mainly because it claims it was never given code ahead of time to write in optimizations into its drivers. Regardless of that, what we’re looking at in this article is mainly the chief claims from the Microsoft camp of how DX10 will add a lusher gaming environment to games.

Lost Planet has full Shader Model 4.0 support which means you have to have a DX10-class card , Windows Vista, and the DX10 demo to run the game in that mode. What we believe we’re seeing here is the early growing pains of an API to develop and mature. As we can see in the screenshots below, there isn’t any visible difference between running the game in DX9 versus DX10. This could be caused by a few factors:

1. The developer’s knowledge of the API and how to properly implement it is limited
2. The Publisher didn’t want to sink more money into developing all the extra “eye candy”
3. As with all APIs, things take awhile to mature

We tend to lean towards the 3rd option as being the most highly probable. We saw similar issues when Shader Model 3.0 came out and ATI’s X800-series was behind the technology curve with that. NVIDIA jumped all over it with all sorts of huge claims; however we’re just now seeing games come out that can substantially task Shader Model 3.0.

So much of what we see in the release of this demo is purely hype on NVIDIA’s part in an effort to bolster support and sales of its G80-class GPUs. While there’s nothing wrong with that (we love Capitalism), we felt we needed to show these screenshots to present things in a more proper light without the marketing spin.

In addition, the jury is still out on ATI’s R600 performance with this particular title as it was released with much – if any – input from them. We’re confident that now the “cat is out of the bag” AMD will ramp its next driver release to have better optimizations for Lost Planet. But in the end, we feel this game will be used as nothing more than a benchmarking utility as the gameplay doesn’t lend itself to the PC market – in fact, it’s still setup natively to use an XBOX 360 controller; which you can get for the PC.

Read all about it here, courtesy of bootdailey.com

Eric