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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 in this game 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.
In the above results we forced the Shader Model to 2.0 here to be able to show real world performance. This is what you will get and see in terms of performance.
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.
There's a reason that I strictly wanted to compare between a Pentium 4 3.6 GHz, an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ and the FX-57, shock and awe. I've been telling over and over again that HL2 is severely CPU limited with current graphics cards. May I finally prove my point for HL2 then? Games need faster CPU's. With the FX-57 we see that HL2 is no longer CPU limited.
3.6 GHz performance is roughly the exact threshold for the game where its heavily limited or will take off in performance. Overclocking a Pentium 4 to 4 GHz will immediately show 100+ FPS performance. Shock and awe huh? That's why the Fx-57 processor is 500 bucks more expensive my friends.
3DMark03 & 05
The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark, 3DMark03, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.
The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems. In this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.
I wanted to show you the bandwidth effects withsSynthetic gaming software in the form of the 3DMark series. The big advantage is that this software is not at all very CPU dependant, it does make a difference for the 03 series though, which clearly sees a little more CPU dependancy then the new 3DMark05.The software runs the reference test run from FutureMark with all options set to default.
BTW you can download all this software for free in the Guru3D.com download sections.
