Page 6 - Bioshock

Bioshock

Ain't she purdy? Unreal 3 powered Bioshock.

2K Games and Epics Unreal 3 Engine get together for a little saltwater taffy at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  Along with the unusual setting for Bioshock also comes with period music of the 40's and 50's, great dialog, and quite a lot of spooky ambiance tracks. Personally, I think the Bioshock developers wanted to model, as closely as possible, the rainy season in Boston.

Bioshock is fairly linear, so by using FRAPS and a minimum of three repetitions for each setting, produced a nice pattern.

Not much going on here, except perhaps the possibility of an upgrade cycle.

And the pattern is nothing. All three cards perform neck and neck with this game, with a slight lead by the X-Fi cards. There were some surprising subjective differences between the cards while playing, though. The clear winner being the X-Fi Prelude.

After the benchmarks were completed, there were quite a few spots where I lingered longer just to listen to the enveloping soundspace and the scary sound effects. The placement accuracy of the Prelude with the surround sound was top notch, followed by the X-Fi, with the X-Meridian sounding the least immersive. It had a slight mixing problem between the surrounds and the front speakers, which is easy enough to fix through volume controls, but it would occassionally pop or glitch audibly when switching from surround to front channels.