Lost Planet

We used two demos to test Lost Planet because the GPU load is different in both of them. Unfortunately, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics cards could not activate FSAA in this game and generated visual artifacts (that we didn’t see on other ATI Radeon HD 2000 solutions), which is an indication of a flaw in the driver or in the Lost Planet demo.

Well, the speed is too low at the maximum graphics quality settings even with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, which is an indisputable leader. The game will shut down automatically because of the too low speed.

When the graphics quality is set at Medium/High, the GeForce 8800 and the Radeon HD 2900 XT accelerate. AMD’s solutions are still behind Nvidia’s products, probably due to the lack of application-specific optimizations in the ATI Catalyst driver.

Note that all the cards, except for the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB, have a somewhat higher speed on the Cave map than on the Snow map. We don’t know the reason for that. Note also that the highest playable resolution on the GeForce 8800 GTX is only 1280x960 pixels.

Every card speeds up after we reduce the quality of visual effects, but the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB is still a loser whereas its 1GB mate can challenge the GeForce 8800 GTX even. The latter card can show a good speed with enabled FSAA.