Bioshock performance analysis

The moment Bioshock was released it was abundantly clear that it would mark the face of gaming forever. The spiritual successor of the famous System Shock 2 delivered an equally amazing experience in the underwater city of Rapture. And the gameplay is not the only good quality Bioshock has.

Using the Unreal 3.0 engine the game is a technical marvel, pushing the Xbox360 to its limits. On personal computers the game looks just as good, and with a high end computer system even better. With the help of higher resolutions and DX10 effects nothing less should be expected.

Test System

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 2.66Ghz.
Motherboard: Asus P5N-E SLI.
Audio: Onboard audio chip – Realtek High Definition Audio.
Memory: 2 x 1 GB OCZ Gold 800Mhz DDR2 memory.
Graphics cards: HIS HD2600XT Zalman edition, AMD HD2900XT, Gainward Bliss 8600GT, XFX 8600GTS, Zotac 8800GTX (special thanks to all companies involved for supplying the hardware).
Drivers: ATI Catalyst 7.9 (Windows XP and Windows Vista) and nVidia Forceware 163.69 (Windows XP and Windows Vista).
Operating system used: Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows XP Professional, both fully updated.

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows Vista/Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the installations, the Nvidia/ATI drivers were installed. All windows updates were then installed as were the latest builds of the benchmarking tools. Finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the Nvidia/ATI drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All applications had their latest patches applied and all hardware features the latest BIOS/Firmware.