Shadows And SLI

We ran the performance test again with all of the default settings in place, except for the two shadows settings. We turned up the shadow quality and shadow resolution settings to high from medium and default settings, respectively. (Note that the game's shadow resolution was the only setting in the demo that had a "default" setting in addition to high, low and medium, and there was no indication of where "default" resided on the high-medium-low spectrum, so it's anyone's guess.) At 1600x1000, Lost Planet became virtually unplayable with shadows maxed out; the game slowed to a crawl with snow frame rates at a lowly 22 FPS and cave frame rates at 26 FPS. Lowering the screen resolution to 1280x720 helped raise the frame rates to a playable level, but the game was still sluggish at 27 FPS for the snow and 30 FPS for the cave.

We finally enabled SLI to see what the demo could really do with the system at full strength. On a side note, we had some troubles with Vista and the Nvidia control panel; when we adjusted the SLI and screen resolution configurations, we were frequently hit with an error message window explaining that the Nvidia control panel application had stopped working. The system even crashed a couple of times while using the control panel. In addition, the system had trouble downloading the SLI driver, and we were forced to restart the Dell several times before it worked properly.

View Lost Planet: Extreme Condition DX10 Slide Show (32 images)

After enabling SLI, we ran the default test again at 1280x720, and right away we saw major improvements. The snow level jumped to 115 FPS, while the cave level posted 80 FPS. Oddly enough, with SLI enabled the frame rates reversed themselves, as the snow level routinely delivered lower frame rates than the cave level during the initial tests with SLI turned off. The only explanation I could come up with this was that the flying Akrid creatures were being displayed in much greater detail and clarity, and therefore were more taxing for the system than the snow level's flurries.

We ran the default test again at 1280x720 with the multi-GPU setting in the demo turned on. This only had a minor effect on the frame rates, but it did raise the snow level to 128 FPS and the cave level to 83 FPS. After turning the shadows up high again, the performance test showed 49 FPS for the snow level and 54 FPS for the cave level. A second test with shadows on high and multi-GPU turned off resulted in 53 FPS for snow and 59 FPS for cave.

After running the performance test several times on the Samsung display, we then hooked up the Dell XPS's original monitor - a Dell 24" UltraSharp LCD display - and maxed out the screen resolution to 2560x1600. The increase in screen resolution had a major impact on frame rates; even with SLI enabled, the game only managed 37 FPS in the snow and 57 FPS in the cave. When we upped the shadow settings to high, the snow level came in at 25 FPS, while the cave level came in at 33 FPS, and the game skipped and lagged at several key points.