Overall, I can't help but feel a little disappointed to see yet another game where the inclusion of DirectX 10 functionality has done nothing for the title either graphically or from a performance standpoint - I really can't tell the DirectX 9 and 10 rendering paths apart, yet performance is lower to quite a considerable degree using the latter. Thus, it looks like we'll have to wait a little longer for that first title that really makes DirectX 10 a must-have commodity for a graphics board.

Examining performance under the DirectX 9 rendering path, things are pretty much as we expected - The ATI boards look good when rendering 'straight', but once anti-aliasing is thrown into the mix performance suffers heavily, and drops to equal footing or worse when compared to equivalent NVIDIA boards. Overall though, 1280x1024 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering looks like a fair target resolution at our selected settings for both ATI's Radeon HD 2900 XT and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. At the mid-range, 1024x768 is comfortable for the Radeon HD 2600 XT, but both mainstream NVIDIA boards would require a drop in in-game image quality to make the game truly enjoyable from a frame rate perspective.

As we've just mentioned, the move to DirectX 10 in this title means quite a performance drop for all parts, which again raises the question of both how well optimised current drivers are for the new API, as well as just how well this generation of hardware is equipped to handle DirectX 10 functionality. It's still too early to answer either of these questions unfortunately, so only time will tell. Beyond that, we once again have to raise a sigh for ATI's showing - First, there's the in-game text corruption issue, which basically makes DirectX 10 unusable, and beyond that, performance in general on Radeon HD 2000 parts is simply unacceptable at present. To be fair, NVIDIA have the advantage of releasing beta drivers specifically to ensure this open beta works correctly, but that still doesn't excuse the poor state of ATI's Catalyst drivers when it comes to DirectX 10 content - If they aren't careful, they face the possibility of being written off in the DirectX 10 performance battleground before they've even started. On the green side of the fence, NVIDIA's performance is much better, with the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB capable of utilising the DirectX 10 rendering path happily at either 1024x768 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering, or 1280x1024 without - Once again though, mid-range DirectX 10 parts just don't seem to be cut out to handle the new API at all.