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Page 6 of 7 Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a game demo that uses DirectX10 under Windows Vista and has a built-in performance test for us to take advantage of. There are two tests, one called ‘Snow’ which is outdoors, long view distances, big open areas, explosions, big weather effects etc, and one called ‘Cave’ which is in an enclosed area with lots of moving 3D creatures. In keeping with previous tests we’ve done on this game, the test was run on resolutions of 640x480, 1280x720 and 1600x1200. 
At low resolutions in the Snow test, both the 8600 cards performed very well, with around a 30% difference between the two, but when the resolutions rose, the performance dropped a surprising amount. I believe this is due to the restricting 128Bit memory pipeline of both of these cards really dragging down the performance when the demand for memory bandwidth grows. At 1600x1200 resolution the difference between the 8600GT and GTS is the biggest we’ve seen, at 35% for the cave test and a massive 69% for the snow test, which I thought was odd, but I left the test running for a few hours on each card, and the results are solid, the 8600GTS has much better performance at high resolutions under DirectX10.
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