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Chronicles of Riddick - Escape from Butcher Bay

Year 2004 finally delivered two of the most awaited and anticipated games: Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Before that Far Cry dropped the bombshell on the gaming industry, totally redefining graphics and gameplay standards. When we thought we had seen it all, Starbreeze and Vivendi delivered the unhyped and low profile game Chronicles Of The Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. The game was first released on the Xbox without too much buzz, noise or publicity. The game was then ported to the PC with buffed up graphics. The game starts with Riddick taken to the prison. Riddick is supposed to be one of the most wanted criminals in the galaxy. Riddick is like an icon in the game. The most fearless, dashing and feared criminal in the whole galaxy. The storyline is not the same as that of the movie; in fact it's entirely different. It starts somewhere in the past in context to the two movies that we saw on the big screen.

Since Far Cry the standard of graphics has changed dramatically. Since then we have seen games like Doom 3 and Half Life 2, which set very high standards in graphics. This particular game closely resembles Doom 3. I personally thought that this game must be running on the Doom 3 engine when I first saw the screenshots in Guru3d forums a few months back. But this is not the Doom 3 engine. It's called Starbreeze Engine Technology © (2002 - 2004 Starbreeze AB.) And mind you it produces stunning graphics. The game is dark. But not scary pitch black as we saw in Doom 3. And darkness is the friend of Riddick in the game, instead of your enemy in Doom 3. Riddick gains the power to see in total darkness in the initial stages of the game.

You will need a pretty powerful machine to run this game at its full glory. The game has shader model profiles for different graphic adapters. So make sure you choose proper shader model before you start playing the game. On machines with Geforce 6 series of cards, the game auto detects Shader 2.0+ but this is unplayable on most machines even with the mighty 6800U graphics card. And many times the game will simply lock up. So make sure you set the Shader Model to 2.0 or lower according to the setup.

The lighting effects are very good and real looking. All models cast shadows properly. Gun modeling is also good. And the game uses some 3rd person views, especially when you are in conversation, climbing onto boxes, hanging on to something or when you are climbing ladders. During this you will notice how well the Riddick is modeled and how good and natural his body movements are. This really shows how well the game engine is working and how much effort was put into making good graphics.Look at how close the results are here. Rather experimental we just enabled the first Riddick results. In the shart above we forced the Shader Model to 2.0 here to be able to compare objectively between brands.

B-E-AUTIFUL performance in SLI as in the highest resolutions things double up.

For those that don't know, a timedemo is simply recording a piece of the game that you play. That piece that you recorded is then used to playback that scene. This way you can objectively measure the framerate with any graphics card, of course with the same parameters and settings. Ehm, suffice to say that the GeForce 7800 GTX owns all :)

I included these results though as you can see where it places the game versus several IQ modes. Have a look at that Shader 2.0++ mode (softshadows are enabled), with any other card to date unless in SLI or Crossfire mode it was 100% unplayable as it was so slow... but soooo awfully beautiful to look at that!

The 7800 GTX makes it happen though, you will be able to play the game in this rather extreme quality mode up-to 10x7. Now once we enable SLI... 1600x1200 suddenly is a relevant option with no less than 47 FPS! No graphics card setup has ever been able to do that.

Shader 2.0++ mode