Lost Planet 2 Benchmark Analysis

Capcom announced that the PC version of Lost Planet 2 will be released on October 15 and to celebrate it, they released the benchmark of the game. You can download it from here. So it's time to see if Capcom optimized their engine for the PC.

We used a Q6600 (@ 3.6Ghz) with 4GB DDR2 and a GTX295 and we were clearly CPU limited, even at 1600x1200 with 16xCSAA HQ and max details in DX9. We got 75.6fps in the first scene, 71.3fps in the second and 61.4fps in the third. In all the scenes that had a lot of human characters on screen, the framerate was taking a noticeable hit. It comes as a shock, since Lost Planet 2's AI is average at best.

Here is the CPU usage during the first Test of the benchmark. Lost Planet 2 uses Capcom's latest version of MT Framework and takes full advantage of the quadcores. Don't get mislead by this though, as you won't get more frames if you overclock even higher a CPU like the Q6600. The major performance flaw of our Q6600 is its low cache (8MB cache), as we saw a nice performance boost with a stock Q9550 (that has 12MB cache). And of course, you'll get even better results with a I7 processor as the game is developed to take full advantage of them.

SLI scales incredibly. We run the benchmark in Single GPU mode and were getting quite disappointing results. With SLI enabled, the framerate doubled and performance was great.

So we can see that Capcom did a great work with the sequel of Lost Planet. It takes full advantage of both multicores and SLI, but needs CPUs with high amount of cache to shine and it doesn't support DX10. Kind of disheartening when there are a lot of gamers with DX10 cards. We should also note that the first game was running way better, even with an E6600 @ 3.51Ghz. But still, it's better optimized than all the other available engines out there!