- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (DirectX9 & 10)

The game's plot focuses on the amnesiac character Wayne Holden, his father, Gale Holden, and the past and future of the planet E.D.N. III. After a particularly vicious battle against a large Akrid known only as "Green Eye", Gale is supposedly killed, and Wayne lost on the icy planes of E.D.N. III . The planet of E.D.N III is perpetually cold and snowy, originally inhabited by a species of aliens known as Akrid, who forced humanity to abandon E.D.N. III by strength of numbers and surprise, which can be found in many and varied forms.

They all share one trait; Thermal Energy, or T.Eng., as it's called in the game. This powerful energy source, found only in Akrid bodies, made humankind determined to fight them after having to retreat from this new menace. They created the Vital Suit, or VS, technology, essentially heated mechs with mounted weapons and powered by T.Eng.

Capcom brought the Lost Planet: Extreme Condition PC version complete with DX10 support. The graphics are stunning and especially if you run VISTA with a high powered GPU processor. In order to benchmark the graphic cards, we used the Demo version which includes a "Performance Test" function. There are two results from two different animated courses that are described as "Snow" and "Cave":

We used the following visual settings for all tests:

Let's now see the performance for our tested card:

The Asus EN8600GTS Top performed well in this demo benchmark with 36FPS and 42FPS for Snow and Cave scenes respectively. Of course, real life gaming could be a little different, and truly, the performance decreased dramatically with exactly the same visual settings and same stage:

We played for a few minutes and the lowest performance we measured was 18FPS, while the average was 28FPS.

Under Windows VISTA, using the same default demo settings as with WinXP, we got for the demo version, about the same gaming speed:

While in real life gaming experience, the rendering performance was marginally better, higher by 2FPS in both lowest/average marks: