From the moment you touch land in BioShock, you get the feeling that you've stepped into a scientifically and philosophically misguided world where Leave It to Beaver never drifted out of the psyche. The game takes place in underwater city that's about to crack open from numerous internal and external forces. Water, understandably, plays an enormous role in the game as you'll spend lots of time splashing through it, running around it, and sometimes using it to electrocute your enemies. The developer spared no expense in making it utterly drinkable for the eyes. You're going to need a decent rig to get everything looking just right in BioShock, but even more modest systems can provide a fantastic experience once you knock down a few settings.
We used the third-party FRAPs video program to benchmark BioShock because the game doesn't have a built-in test. We created a 30-second run through Rapture's medical facilities for our test. The tour passes through wide-open spaces (or, at least, as wide as they get in BioShock), small corridors, and dark, shadow-ridden rooms. Between these varied environments the test run should be a fair representation of the game.
We've divided our guide into four main sections that have the biggest impact on game performance: game settings, video cards, processors, and system memory.
Game Settings
There are definitely a few settings you should tweak if you don't have an up-to-date computer. You can reclaim a lot of performance if you're willing to make a few compromises. Fortunately, the game still looks fantastic at even the lowest-quality settings. We enabled and disabled each setting to see how they affected frame rates, and we've also taken graphics-comparison shots to show you what they do.
Graphics
There's no getting around it: BioShock demands a good video card. The minimum specs require at least a GeForce 6600 GT, but we'd recommend going few notches higher. Find out how the game performs across a variety of video cards, and in Windows Vista with DirectX 10.
CPU
We've found that BioShock benefits from multicore processors. If you're on an aging Pentium 4 or a slower Athlon 64, you might have something to worry about.
Memory
BioShock requires 1GB of memory according to the developer, but we tested the game with 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB of RAM to see how much memory the game really needs to function. The game does load with 512MB of system memory, but the resultant chugging makes the game almost unplayable.
Sample System Performance
We put together a few sample systems to show how the game performed using real-world computers. Our aging 2.4GHz Pentium 4 system barely managed to run the game at higher graphics settings. We had to knock the graphical settings down to medium and set the resolution to 800x600 to get the game in a playable state. Our single-core AMD Athlon 64 4000+ with Radeon X1650 XT gave us a decent experience at lower resolutions, but we did notice that the system took a bit longer to load textures, which often froze us for a few seconds when we entered new areas. The dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60 paired with the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB performed very well, and the game was more than playable at 1280x1024 with high-quality settings. Both of our Intel Core 2 setups paired with GeForce 8800 series cards had no issues whatsoever running BioShock. We cranked up the resolution and the settings with nary a hiccup.
System Level Performance Tests
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Athlon 64 FX-60, Athlon 64 4000+, Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe, 1GB Corsair XMS Memory (512MB x 2), 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2. Graphics Cards: Radeon X1900 XT 256MB, Radeon X1650 XT 256MB, beta ATI Catalyst Hot Fix 8.401.1.
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz, Asus P4C800, 1GB Corsair XMS Memory (512MB x 2), 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2. Graphics Card: GeForce 6800 128MB, beta Nvidia ForceWare 163.44.
More Features
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