Page 9 - FireStarter

FireStarter
In FireStarter, your character is engaging in play on a convincing virtual-reality simulator when a virus is introduced into the computer system. The system goes haywire, at once generating fierce monsters that attack you while simultaneously rendering you unable to disconnect from the virtual world. You must complete each level within a specific time period to have any hope of escaping the confines of this computer-generated place in a semi DirectX 8.1 and 9 environment.

Particle systems:

• Particle systems, explosions, projectile flight effects are made of basic effects and can be as much complex as needed
• All effects are plug-ins
• Standardized protocol for effect programming
• 11 basic effects as spray, splinters, flashes, trigger, etc.
• Simple mechanism of building effects in the levels and binding to entity of the level.
• Programmable recurrence of the effects

• Steam, smoke, fire, geyser and other effects based on the particle systems
• Realistic localized volumetric fog with the possibility of camera-view from inside and outside
• Global volumetric fog throughout the whole level without level geometry and used shaders constraints
• Lighting with omni, directed, volumetric light, lighting with skybox
• Dynamic light
• Projected textures
• Detailing textures
• Halo, radiance around the sources of light

• Standard script language for creation of multi-pass/multitexture shaders
• Standard procedural deformations of the vertex coordinates
• Standard procedural deformations of the texture coordinates
• Standardized interface for embedding shader effects (renders), which use the latest video accelerator possibilities as programmable vertex/pixel conveyers.
• Plug-ins for effects with diffuse/specular bump-mapping, EMBM, anisotropic lighting, etc., that support several rendering techniques for any hardware acceleration (starting with Riva TNT2)
• Original rendering algorithm for large amount of static and dynamic geometry
• Procedural textures as water, fire, plasma, etc.

I received this application from GSC Game World one day before the release of this article. Another limitation is that right now we can only benchmark at 1024x768 and 1280x1024. So I quickly benchmarked a few other cards with it. Since it's so new we can know for sure no specific driver cheats are activated (yet). The R9600-256MB is a Radeon 9600 non XT/Pro version of the 9600. It's the non pro version equipped with 256MB memory. The Pro/XT version are faster. As you can see the FX 5700U is doing really cool stuff here. For the upper region (high-end) cards I chose a Radeon 9800 Pro and GeForce FX 5950 as comparison. Since the game uses DX9 shaders we can see ATI on the move.

And for your information, FireStarter has not yet been released. More info here.