Date:
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Dark Void PhysX Gameplay Performance and IQ

Dark Void was recently released with some neat PhysX effects. We’ll explore gameplay performance and show you what PhysX support will do for you in this game with plenty of screenshots and performance comparisons.

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Graphics Options in Dark Void

In the way of graphics options, Dark Void comes with striking evidence of being a console game first, and a PC game second, even though the game was simultaneously released on Windows and on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. There are just eight graphics options available, including such mundane options as brightness, resolution, and vsync, and including the game’s PhysX options.

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Texture Quality

This option affects texture resolution. Higher levels of detail are generally better, so set this option as high as your video memory will allow. Available options are High, Medium, and Low.

Model Quality

This option affects the detail of the meshes for in-game objects such as landscape items and enemies. Available options are High, Medium, and Low.

Dynamic Shadows

This option toggles dynamic shadows. This has a large impact in image quality and the biggest impact on performance of any of the settings except for PhysX. Leave Dynamic Shadows enabled for the best gameplay experience. Available options are On and Off.

Decals

This option toggles the use of decals to simulate blood splatters and bullet holes during combat. Available options are On and Off.

Resolutions

The Resolutions option allows the gamer to select the game’s resolution from a list of resolutions supported by the video card and display device. Note that this option does not actually show which resolution is currently in use. Available options will depend on what your video card and monitor are mutually capable of.

PhysX in Dark Void

Airtight Games has worked with NVIDIA to include PhysX technology for the PC version of Dark Void. There are a number of effects used by the game, and they are controlled by a single setting off of the game’s Options submenu.

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Off

When set to off, no PhysX options are enabled. Use this option if you have a graphics card that can’t accelerate PhysX, or if your CPU cannot handle the "Low" PhysX option.

Low

The Low PhysX setting enables weapon particle effects only. It can be calculated by the CPU or by the GPU.

Medium

The Medium PhysX setting enables weapon particle effects and the advanced fluid effects for the Disintegrator gun. The Disintegrator gun effects use turbulent fluid motion calculations to display 30,000 particle objects in each Disintegrator explosion.

High

The High PhysX setting enables weapon particle effects, advanced turbulent fluid effects for the Disintegrator gun, and jetpack turbulence and smoke. The jetpack effects use fluid simulation to make the smoke move realistically. It uses up to 100,000 particles on the screen at a time to render the smoke trails.

Anti-Aliasing

There is no in-game option to enable Anti-Aliasing (AA) in Dark Void. Using NVIDIA’s 196.21 WHQL certified driver, we can force AA options from the NVIDIA control panel using the "Override" option when using video cards with NVIDIA’s GPUs.

Unfortunately, with AMD’s Catalyst driver versions 9.12 Hotfix and 10.1 WHQL, we were unable to utilize AA. AMD says that Dark Void specific optimizations are coming soon, so we hope to see them in Catalyst 10.2 or 10.3.

Testing Dark Void

During our testing of Dark Void, we found that flight-based action scenarios offered very little challenge for our video cards. It was only really during on-foot combat that enough enemies and particles were on screen to really push our video cards at all. Of the scenarios in the game, we found that Episode 2, Chapter 1 offered the most aggressive use of our video cards, thanks to the extended combat scenes with several enemies on the screen at once. These battles, especially when fought using the disintegrator weapon and the jetpack, create some very busy, highly detailed scenes. So, for our evaluation, we are recording framerates for the first 10 minutes of Episode 2, Chapter 1 of Dark Void.