Dear lord that’s a lot of snow

 

It’s here! Today marks the release of the first real playable DX10 gaming software. Granted, it’s just a demo of the the upcoming PC port of X-Box 360’s Lost Planet, but it’s also a heavily modified port sporting fancy smancy DirectX 10 effects. Early adopters of nVidia’s 8800 DX10 video cards and Windows Vista finally have something other than tech demos to utilize their hefty investment. Life sure is looking grand!

Capcom was courteous enough to include a benchmark with the Lost Planet demo, which actually comes in two varieties – a DX9 vanilla version and suped-up DX10 counterpart. Both weigh in at around 350mb, so the DX10 demo here doesn’t seem to have the extra large textures promised in their original announcement. What it does feature, however, is full Shader 4.0 support and advanced geometry shader effects, as demonstrated by a massive serving of particles in the form of snowflakes.

Running the demo on an dual-core FX60 and 8800GTX with 2Gb of RAM, my system was only able to churn out framerates in the mid-teens with game settings maxed out at 1920x1200. A few screenshots from the benchmark are included below, including the images from the video settings menu to show in-game options. Note the red X-Box style “back” button on the bottom left hand corner of the menu – either someone forgot to swap out a menu graphic or Capcom really wants you to play the game with a gamepad.

Full resolution screens are linked as well, and I’ll be posting some DX9 comparisons shortly. Stay tuned!