BioShock Infinite, the third opus of the series and also the most anticipated game of this year was released about a month ago. It received metascores of 95/100 and was often compared to the first BioShock being even better. Here we will not discuss about the game unfortunately, we're mostly intesrested by the performance side. In this regard, BioShock Infinite makes use of a modified version of the well known optimised Unreal Engine 3 with DirectX 11 support.


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The game being beautiful, kickass and also bundled with AMD graphics cards gives us three good reasons to test its performance. The testing methodology is very simple as the game comes with six graphical presets from "Very Low" to "Ultra" and an integrated benchmark. Furthermore, the game, drivers as well as windows were all up to date (see "Test setup below for further information").

- First of all we tested if the integrated benchmark was an accurate representation of the experience you can expect when playing the game for real. To do so we ran the benchmark with three different presets and played the game with the same settings and compare the average FPS measured in both cases. It resulted that the same results, 1-2 fps close, making the integrated benchmark worth it and good.

- Second, we took screenshots of the same scene for all different presets to show you the difference in graphics quality.

- Third, we measured the video memory usage. In this case we monitored the video memory usage using GPU-Z under the integrated benchmark at a resolution of 1920x1080 with all the different presets. On page 2 we reported the max video memory usage of both GeForce GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970. We also recorded the benchmark using Fraps and uploaded it on youtube (video on page 2).

- And finally the most important, the benchmark results! As most DirectX 11 graphics cards were able to achieve 40 fps and up at 1920x1080 with Ultra settings and AA enabled we only ran the benchmark with that preset (DDOF was deactivated). The original plan was to bench the cards under different presets that suits the card the most but in the case of BioShock Infinite it turned out to not be necessary unless you want to see 200+ fps.
We will tomorrow add an additional page where we show what is the impact one can expect lowering or raising graphics settings performance wise. To do so, we will take four different cards and measure the difference in performance there is in the benchmark results from a setting to another. Results will be shown as an average gain/loss in percentage.

Following, the test setup with the 26 graphics cards used.

Test Setup

Hardware

Mainboard	ASUS Maximus V Gene (BIOS 1604)
CPUs	Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.0 GHz (Turbo On / HT On)
Memory	G.Skill RipjawsZ Dual Channel 4x4GB CL9-9-9-24-DDR3-1600 MHz
Graphic Cards (Driver)	nVidia GeForce GTX 680 SLI nVidia GeForce GTX 680 nVidia GeForce GTX 670 nVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti nVidia GeForce GTX 660 nVidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost nVidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti nVidia GeForce GTX 580 nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448C nVidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti nVidia GeForce GTX 470 nVidia GeForce GTX 465 nVidia GeForce GTX 460 AMD Radeon HD 7970 GE CF AMD Radeon HD 7970 GE AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 7850 AMD Radeon HD 7790 AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850
Drivers	Windows 7 x64 (up to date) NVIDIA ForceWare 314.22 WHQL AMD Catalyst 13.3 Beta3 Intel Chipset Driver 9.3.0.1026
Games and OS	Windows 7 x64 (Up to date on the 21/03/2013) Bioshock Infinite (was up to date on the 18/04/2013)
HDD	OCZ Technology Octane 512 GB SSD
PSU	Seasonic Platinum SS-1000XP / 1000 Watts

Page 1 - Introduction & Test Setup
Page 2 - Image Quality & Video Memory Usage
Page 3 - 1920x1080 Ultra + AA Performance
Page 4 - Performance gain by graphics setting change

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