Aliens vs. Predator Test Results

Rebellion, SEGA and Twentieth Century FOX have released the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 Benchmark to the public. As with many of the already released DirectX 11 benchmarks, the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 benchmark leverages your DirectX 11 hardware to provide an immersive game play experience through the use of DirectX 11 Tessellation and DirectX 11 Advanced Shadow features.

In Aliens vs. Predator, DirectX 11 Geometry Tessellation is applied in an effective manner to enhance and more accurately depict HR Giger's famous Alien design. Through the use of a variety of adaptive schemes, applying tessellation when and where it is necessary, the perfect blend of performance and visual fidelity is achieved with at most a 4% change in performance.

DirectX 11 hardware also allows for higher quality, smoother and more natural looking shadows as well. DirectX 11 Advanced Shadows allow for the rendering of high-quality shadows, with smoother, artifact-free penumbra regions, which otherwise could not be realized, again providing for a higher quality, more immersive gaming experience.

Benchmark Reviews is committed to pushing the PC graphics envelope, and whenever possible we configure benchmark software to its maximum settings for our tests. In the case of Aliens vs. Predator, all cards were tested with the following settings: Texture Quality-Very High, Shadow Quality-High, HW Tessellation & Advanced Shadow Sampling-ON, Multi Sample Anti-Aliasing-4x, Anisotropic Filtering-16x, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)-ON. You will see that this is a challenging benchmark, with all the settings turned up and a screen resolution of 1920 x 1200, it takes an HD5870 card to achieve an average frame rate higher than 30FPS.

Now we get into the full DirectX 11 only benchmarks, so we're looking at the full potential for graphics rendering that's available on only the latest generation of video cards. AvP is a tough benchmark, but it has been a fair one so far, and it's very useful for testing the newest graphics hardware. To get much higher than the 30FPS range, it really takes the latest and greatest cards, or a couple of midrange cards paired up in SLI or CrossFireX.

The MSI N560GTX-Ti ends up tied with the Radeon HD 5870 in this test, and the modest factory overclock puts it a little more than 8% ahead of the MSI R6870 card. What amazes me is how much better the 560 is than the 460, which if you all remember, was no slouch when it was introduced. The consistency of the improvement is impressive, as well. This is not an example of "driver tuning" to sell the old stuff at new prices; the GTX 560Ti is always better.

In our next section, Benchmark Reviews looks at one of the newest and most popular games, Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The game lacks a dedicated benchmarking tool, so we'll be using FRAPS to measure frame rates within portions of the game itself.

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