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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.

This is what you will get and see in terms of performance. As you can see we notice a massive graphics card bottleneck here. The better timings hardly have an effect.

Half-Life 2
The moment the entire graphics industry was waiting for is here, after a delay or 200 one of the biggest titles in the history of PC games was released by Valve, Half-Life 2. Gameplay that should be extraordinary, sound that'll make you drool and a first time graphics experience that'll make the choice between doing the "thing" or playing this game a difficult one.

Gordon Freeman is back! Along with scientist Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, your mission is to save the planet from total alien supremacy. See, that petite incident in Black Mesa was just the beginning: now those pesky Xen invaders and a new threat called the Combine have spread across the whole Earth, causing massive amounts of death and destruction. Its up to you to set things right.

The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2s lighting seems a lot more "natural". Let me put it like this, Doom 3s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2s lighting is just "accepted" by the eye as lights reflect, and create shadows with precision, streaming through windows with an unnerving realism.

For HL2 we recorded our own timedemo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.

With the FX-57 we see that HL2 is no longer CPU limited. What about memory then? Well it definitely can make difference.