High vs. Low details

Some people prefer higher resolutions to texture detail and others just own graphics cards that can’t render Bioshock in all its glory at a stable framerate. Owners of cards like the 8800GTX and the HD2900XT usually aren’t affected by this, but as soon as you drop out of the high-end sector turning down in-game details often becomes a must. Based on the Unreal 3.0 engine Bioshock is quite scalable, making it possible to run it on slower hardware. You lose a lot of the visual flare by doing this, but sometimes that just can’t be helped.

Even by observing the small thumbnails you can see that some of the graphical detail is missing from the low detail picture. The dynamic shadow at the bottom of the screen is gone, as is a lot of the light detail from the room beyond the door in the middle of the screen. Taking a closer look at the full sized images also reveals a loss of texture detail due to the lower resolution, as well as the absence of reflections and bump maps (or any kind of pixel shading in general). Last but not least, you can’t see that dynamic lights are gone, resulting in a flat look of all objects in the game. It still doesn’t look terrible, but it certainly isn’t gorgeous anymore.

Sure enough all the detail lost resulted in a huge performance boost on all three cards. Under Windows XP the already decent framerates became ultra smooth. The 8600GTS came out on top with the HD2600XT just behind it. Even the 8600GT, although behind by a good 5 frames didn’t disappoint.

In Vista the performance increase mirrored what happened in the older OS, with numbers almost two times higher. However, while it would be possible to raise some of the detail sliders in Windows XP without much trouble, doing the same under Vista just might make the game stutter here and there.