Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Benchmark
Lost Planet is one of the world’s first DirectX 10 games, and producer Capcom happened to include a performance benchmark. The benchmark consists of two different testing loops (snow and cave) that run over and over until you stop the test. The software averages the results of the last two runs of each loop; I let the whole thing run through six times at 1280x960x64 bit resolution with all graphics settings on maximum and came back with the following results:

Snow: 32.3 fps
Cave: 37.4 fps

The snow benchmark is by far the more demanding of the two tests; the camera moves through a mainly external environment where swirling snow is a constant source of movement. However, that didn’t slow the 8800 GT XXX at all – as you can see from the five FPS difference in frame rate, the card was able to handle the more complex physics of the snow scene without any problems whatsoever.

Call of Juarez Benchmark
As a part of the US release of its DirectX 10 game Call of Juarez, Techland created a DirectX 10 benchmark. The benchmark has two mutually exclusive settings (multi-sampling and super-sampling) so I ran the test twice. For the first test, I set the resolution to 1280x1024, shadowmap size to 2048x2048, shadows quality to 3, super sampling off and multi-sampling on (x4) and came back with:

FPS
Min: 8.2
Max: 29.1
Avg: 13.7

For the second test, I switched super sampling on (x4) and multi-sampling off and came back with:

FPS
Min: 9.0
Max: 42.0
Avg: 16.8

While super sampling (which is benchmark only) still gives 8800 series cards plenty of difficulties, multisampling is no longer as much of an issue. While the 16.8 average frame rate is certainly much lower than you’d want to see during a game, the median score is probably much higher, because most of the demo now runs without any issues.

A side-angle shot of the 8800 GT XXX.