Lost Planet Demo released today

DX10 video card owners can give their cards a good testing with CapCom’s demo of Lost Planet:Extreme Condition. They have also released a DX9 version along side the DX10. However Radeon DX10 owners may not be so lucky as the following blurb indicates:

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is the first game demo that takes advantage of NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series DirectX 10-compatible graphics processors. NVIDIA has worked closely with Capcom to bring the hit Xbox 360 action shooter to the PC, providing technical expertise and GeForce® 8 Series graphics processing units (GPUs) for development and testing. Lost Planet is in NVIDIA’s The Way Its Meant To Be Played® program.

Hmmm, obviously the ATI guys at AMD are not too impressed by all of this and have released the following:

“Lost Planet” is an Nvidia-sponsored title, and one that Nvidia has had a chance to look at and optimize their drivers for. The developer has not made us aware of this new benchmark, and as such the ATI Radeon driver team has not had the opportunity explore how the benchmark uses our hardware and optimize in a similar fashion. Over the next little while AMD will be looking at this, but in the meantime, please note that whatever performance you see will not be reflective of what gamers will experience in the final build of the game.

The guys over at Legit Reviews have done a great side by side comparison of the demo with a GeForce 8800 GTX and a Radeon HD2900 XT and the differences are obvious. The game has of course been designed with the GeForce cards in mind and I’m sure AMD will release drivers to overcome the differences. However I felt a comparison using the 8800 GTS would have been better as the GTX is much more expensive than the HD2900 XT.

Even so the release of the Lost Planet demo will have taken any remaining shine off the over due Radeon HD2900 XT launch. Time for AMD to pick up the ball!