Conclusion

Once you get beyond the activation issues, BioShock really becomes a treat. The game sports very good graphics with a fully interactive environment, while the plot really redefines the genre: if you thought Half-Life 2 had an engaging story, you’ll be absolutely thrilled with BioShock’s. Like a good RPG, your actions will affect the game’s ultimate outcome, so you may want to play it different ways to see how things pan out at the end.

In terms of hardware requirements, the game isn’t quite as demanding as we initially thought it would be. Sure, you will want a nice dual-core processor for best performance, but graphically, it doesn’t look like you’ll have to shell out the big bucks for an SLI setup or GeForce 8800 Ultra if you want to play the game with full DX10 graphics. In fact, we noted little difference in performance between DX9 and DX10, and with the exception of soft particles, little or no difference between the two visually either. If you plan on gaming at 1920x1200 or higher with the graphics settings cranked up to max and want the game to run in the 30-40 FPS range you will want a GeForce 8800 card however.

In terms of performance, NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 Ultra obviously delivers the best performance in BioShock, although a bone stock GeForce 8800 GTX doesn’t trail by much 6-12% depending on resolution in our testing. If you’ve got a factory overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX, your performance will obviously be even better.

With fewer stream processors and less onboard memory, the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and 320MB trail the GTX by over 25%, but still deliver very playable frame rates in the game up to 1920x1200. At 2560x1600 the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra pull even further away from the GTS cards, running about 1.5 times faster in our testing. AMD’s Radeon HD 2900 XT trails NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB by over 20% at 1600x1200 in DX10, but as the resolution increases the gap slowly closes until the 2900 XT is practically even with the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB by 2560x1600. Considering that the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB has less memory and a narrower memory interface, not to mention fewer stream processors, this has got to be disappointing to Radeon enthusiasts, but we wouldn’t be surprised if AMD has more driver tweaks in the works to improve BioShock’s performance (adding CrossFire support to BioShock is likely in the works as well, the current hotfix driver doesn't support CrossFire). As it stands now though the Radeon HD 2900 XT isn’t that much faster than an X1950 Pro running under DX9 with the same graphics settings.

UPDATE 8/30/07: With DX9 properly enabled in BioShock, the Radeon HD 2900 XT turns into a screamer, outperforming the GeForce 8800 GTS and GeForce 8800 GTX and giving the GeForce 8800 Ultra a run for its money. This indicates that AMD has got a lot of work to do to get their DX10 driver up to the level of DX9 in this game. If you crave performance, we recommend Radeon HD 2900 XT owners run the game in DX9 mode, the only downside is you will lose DX10 water ripples.

We’ll be taking a look at BioShock’s performance with today’s latest mainstream cards next. We’ve already read reports from GeForce 8600 GTS users seeing decent frame rates in BioShock, so we’re hoping for good things. All indications are that the game should be quite playable under DX10 as well, so that should be a nice bonus as well…