BioShock Infinite: Graphical Analysis

BioShock has always divided the critics with its graphics and settings, and its newest installment, BioShock Infinite is no different. Set in the 1920's in the Steampunk-esq floating city of Columbia, for the vast majority of the game, the visuals are bright and majestic. Lets have a look how the game looks, its settings and how your system will run it, and finally, lets compare it to Crysis 3, the best looking game of the year so far.

System Requirements

BioShock Infinite comes with the option of either DirectX10 or 11, for the purpose of this analysis, we'll be running it in the full bells-and-whistles DX11 guise (because its pretty). The minimum system requirements for the game are low, as in really, really low; needing only an Athlon X2 5200+ and an ATI Radeon HD 3850 for example. At those specs, you'll be getting basic DX10 and everything on minimum. The recommended specs still aren't all that high either, deeming a Q6600 and a GeForce GTX 560 worthy of playing Infinite at DX11 settings. Impressive to say the least, but perhaps a little worrying it doesn't require top end components for top end graphics.

Graphics Settings

We fired up the game and took a look at the graphics settings:

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In the graphics settings menu you get all the usual choices although its nice to see aspect ratio as an option as well. The custom preset allows you to tweak all the settings individually. Its important to notice the frame rate locking feature, something that could be useful for low power systems, though if you've got a modern gaming system, you probably want to turn this off! The option to change the field of view is a very welcome one, as lots of gamers have a preference or wide-screen setups, though for the purposes of this analysis, we'll be keeping it at its default setting of 70 degrees.

The graphics in Infinite have polarized some opinion already but that depends on your attitude to 1920's Steampunk. Frankly I think they are truly stunning; the lighting effects especially definitely deserve special mention.

Screenshots

Here's a pick of the games graphics from the first few hours of gameplay, all at the highest (ultra) settings naturally. They have been JPG’d, but at a low compression ratio. (We've tried to avoid spoilers too!)

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Zoomed-in Textures

With the images zoomed in 3x and cropped to an appropriate size, we can see the the textures, lighting  and anti-aliasing in BioShock Infinite. I've also included an image below from the Crysis 3 graphical comparison for reference.

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With the images zoomed in 3x and cropped to an appropriate size, we can see the slight difference in textures, lighting  and anti-alasing  between the two games. Anti-alasing is very similar between the two despite the fact Infinite lacks the deep AA settings that Crysis 3 has, but when set to Ultra with AA fully on, it certainly seems to keep up. In terms of lighting, Crysis 3 is still king, with its clearly defined beams of light, versus BioShock's bloom. All in all, the texture presentation in the two games are similarly good, but one has to take into account the difference in game styles, as this affects how the textures are presented to the gamer.

Thermal Load & GPU Memory Usage

Infinite looks great, that's easy to see, but just how hard does it have to push your graphics card to pull off these visuals? Well, lets take a look, and compare the results with Crysis 3 shall we? Using a factory overclocked GeForce GTX 670 2GB card running at 1,045 MHz core boost clock and 6,008 MHz memory clock, with the games set to their highest settings and running at a resolution of 1920x1200, a screenshot of GPU temperature, GPU usage and frame buffer usage was taken after 15 minutes of gameplay. In order to keep the fan speeds the same throughout, the card’s cooler was manually set to run at a constant 50% speed using the ASUS GPU Tweak utility.

The system used included an Intel Core i7-3570k running at 4GHz, 16GB of DDR3 memory, and an ASUS Sabertooth Z77 motherboard and the aforementioned GeForce GTX 670.

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Lets compare these numbers to the ones we got from Crysis (DX10) and Crysis 3:

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Comparing BioShock to both Crysis and Crysis 3, we can see that in terms of GPU temperature and GPU usage, its right up there with the others, but then uses significantly less frame buffer percentage, some 24% less in fact.

Thoughts and Conclusion

In the technical sense there is no doubt that BioShock Infinite is fantastic, but whether or you're into its strong visual style depends on your aptitude to bloom and its aesthetic design. Personally I even prefer it to Crysis 3. In terms of sheer GPU grunt required to power it, BioShock is less demanding than Crysis 3 (the required specs demonstrate this), even though the GPU temperature was marginally higher while playing BioShock.

Have you been playing BioShock Infinite? What do you think of the game and the graphics? Let us know in the forums.