Akella recently released a DX10 tech demo-benchmark of their upcoming naval action sim PT Boats. The benchmark is called Knights of the Sea. The final game will support both DX10 and DX9, but this demo is a demonstration of what the final game will look like in DirectX 10. The demo features all the visual effects and some of the highly detailed models that will be available in the game.

The main DX10 graphics features of PT boats: Knights of the Sea tech demo-benchmark: Advanced ocean rendering, soft particles, reflections, light beams, advanced transparency and Advanced HDR for gunfire and sun reflection. The benchmark supports all the latest DirectX 10 graphics cards and quite honestly; it's a feast for the eyes.

Fresh from the developer themselves, is a new DX10 benchmark which you can download here. It's an lovely  test and actually shows the in-game performance (according to the developer). You are looking at high image quality settings, yet no AA is enabled here as it's just too harsh on the graphics cards and we think there's a bug with AA.

As the results show, PT boats even seems to dislike 512MB cards when the resolution goes up.

What I wanted to show you is a 100% DX10 title, and that's where the extra framebuffer memory kicks in.

Overclocking & Tweaking

As most of you with most videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.

What do we need?
One of the best tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that you can download here. If you own an ATI or NVIDIA graphics card then the manufacturer actually has very nice built in options for you that can be found in the display driver properties.

Where should we go ?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 500 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 25 to 50 MHz.

More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today tested cards anyway, but we'll still show it ;)

All in all... do it at your own risk.

• Any generic 8800 GT at standard is at 600 / 1512 / 1800 clocks (core / shaders / memory).
• This standard for this card is at 600 / 1512/ 1800 (core / shaders / memory).
• We overclocked it towards 776 / 1940 / 2000 (core / shaders / memory).

That is such an excessive overclock. Let's check out what kind of impact that has on performance.

As you can see, the result is a notably faster performing card. The game you are looking at is Call of Duty 4.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• All settings maxed out