- 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 with 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 graphics cards, we used the Demo version that includes a "Performance Test" function. There are two test results from two different animated courses, "Snow" and "Cave":

We used the following visual settings for all tests:

Let's now see the performance produced by the cards:

The Gainward 8600GT performed well in the demo benchmark with 26FPS and 39FPS for the Snow and Cave scenes respectively. Comparing it with the Asus EN8600GTS Top, we see that the major difference in performance occurs in the Snow test.

Of course, real life gaming could be a little different, and in truth, the performance dropped off dramatically with exactly the same visual settings and same stage:

We played around 60secs and the lowest performance we measured was 10FPS, while the average was 16FPS. Again, you have to lower the details or screen resolution to make the game playable.

Under Windows VISTA, using the same default demo settings as with WinXP, we got slightly lower framerates for the demo version:

While for real life gaming experience, the rendering performance of the Gainward 8600GT PCX 512MB was still low at only 20FPS. As we can see, the higher memory/core frequencies of the Asus EN8600GTS Top offer much better performance, but it also costs more.