Bioshock

When Bioshock came out, a couple of us stayed up for like 17 hours or however long it took to play the game the whole way through. We started working on our own review of the game shortly after completing it, but progress on that has been very slow due to us attending so many events in the past month. However, if you ever get a chance to read IGN’s review of the game on PC we strongly suggest you do so, as it parallels our thoughts quite well. The game represents a level of artistic and graphical splendor never before seen on any game in any genre while maintaining pretty decent gameplay and a mindblowingly fantastic story. If you have not played Bioshock, make sure you at least download the free demo over the Steam network. It is certainly an experience we would recommend to every gamer, whether they are a first person shooter fan or not. The fact that it is cross-platform only enhances its awesomeness. All graphical settings are set to high and every effect is enabled except for “Force Global Lighting” because for some reason that is turned off by default, we suspect because it doesn’t make the game look any better and adversely effects system performance. Vsync has to be manually turned off with each game restart, which pretty much sucks but is bearable. We ran a set of tests in DX9 and in DX10. Bioshock in DX10 with full settings doesn’t hold a candle to Crysis at very high settings, but we will only consider that a deficiency when you show us a computer that can run Crysis on those settings without it being nearly impossible to aim in real-time.

Our Bioshock test is a new one and we do it a bit different from other sites. Because such a crucial (and frequently occurring) part of the game is killing splicers, we leave enemies alive when we run the test. Our test occurs in the Medical Pavilion area of Rapture and starts right after you hack the flying security bot to dislodge the door. We then run and cap the chick in the back of the head and pick up her gun, then turn to cap the doctor dude on the stairs in his head as well. After flicking the security switch thing we wait at the door with the wrench in hand ready to beat down the chick in the hallway. After doing that with ease we run through the next door and pick up the machine gun and flip the other switch. We then book it back down the stairs to where the security bot room is, where there should be two splicers about ready to jump at you. If you time it right, you should be able to own both of them with one shot each and head up the stairs in the atrium. This is where you will find several splicers, some of which have pistols, the rest of which have a pipe or a pipe wrench. With a fair amount of skill you should be able to headshot these guys as well. After disposing of the enemies you should have about 10 seconds left of the programmed 60. We usually find our friendly security bot and destroy it, then proceed to shoot out the windows of the control room across the atrium. If time is not out by then we hold down fire on the machine gun until fraps indicates that the benchmark has completed. This process is repeated at least 5 times, as Bioshock demonstrates the same kind of variance as Oblivion when testing using fraps. We did, however, notice that our tests for Bioshock were fairly precise, as all 5 or more tests were usually within a few tenths of an FPS.


Bioshock really eats up video cards like crazy. The game is based on the same Unreal Engine 3 technology that powers Rainbow Six: Vegas, Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, Huxley, Warmonger… and more. Nevertheless, the game is pretty playable at these frame rates, as lightning fast reaction times and lag-less gameplay are less important than technique and the use of all abilities when taking down big daddies. You can see here that the 8800GTX beats out all of the other entries in both DX9 and DX10. The graphical horsepower required to play Bioshock is perhaps greater than with any other game (disregarding the Crysis SP demo that recently became available) on the market right now, and as such the most beastly video card in our test had turned out the victor. Also note that there appears to be a slight decrease in performance under SLI configuration. This could be a result of the video drivers or the game itself in Vista, not sure which is the case. On a final note, and we know we’re cutting this one pretty close, if anyone knows where we can find a Big Daddy costume in time for Halloween, please share.