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Gaming: World in Conflict

Impressive gameplay and graphics that will make you go into shock and awe. Yes, World in Conflict has been released. This game offers a serious graphical challenge to you guys, the gamers. Wars often end in either victory, loss or compromise.

Vivendi Universal recently was kind enough to send us a copy a couple of days prior to the release of the game. You are an avid Guru3D reader so that means you also know we'll do things a bit differently. It's not going really quickly, but slowly we see more and more DirectX 10 titles becoming available on the market.

World in Conflict is a late Cold War real-time strategy game with a strong focus on unit tactics, action, team play, and destruction. Players take on a specific role commanding air, armor, infantry, and support units to form a combined arms force against the enemy. By controlling key strategic points on the map, you sway the battle in your favor. There is no resource-gathering, so every second not spent fighting the enemy over a piece of land is a second wasted.

What you are observing here are the DX9 codepath results. The results with the 7.9.1 catalyst driver where so dramatic (below 20 FPS in ANY resolution) that we where forced to measure performance with he DX9 codepath (image quality looks pretty much the same anyways). This is a very young test we developed here. We start at the resolution of 1600x1200, and have selected in-game medium IQ (DX9 with no AA). In DX9 the 2900 Pro & XT show really good performance. The XT in 2560x1600 was showing a bug which shows clearly in performance.

Gaming: PT Boats Knights of the Sea DX10 Benchmark

Akella recently released a DX10 tech demo-benchmark of their upcoming naval action sim PT Boats. The benchmark is called Knights of the Sea. The final game will support both DX10 and DX9, but this demo is a demonstration of what the final game will look like in DirectX 10. The demo features all the visual effects and some of the highly detailed models that will be available in the game.

The main DX10 graphics features of PT boats: Knights of the Sea tech demo-benchmark: Advanced ocean rendering, Soft particles, Reflections, light beams and advanced transparency and Advanced HDR for gunfire and sun reflection. The benchmark supports all the latest DirectX 10 graphics cards and quite honestly it's a feast to the eyes.

Fresh from the developer themselves. A new DX10 benchmark which you can download here, it's an excellent test and actually shows the in-game performance (according to the developer). We only started using it last week and I have not had the time to include any other cards just yet. You are looking at high image quality settings, yet no AA is enabled here as it's just too harsh on the graphics cards.

Keep this benchmark in mind, we'll include and update results with each new DX10 graphics card review.