From the moment you touch land in BioShock, you get the feeling that you've stepped into a scientifically and philosophically misguided world where Leave It to Beaver never drifted out of the psyche. The game takes place in underwater city that's about to crack open from numerous internal and external forces. Water, understandably, plays an enormous role in the game as you'll spend lots of time splashing through it, running around it, and sometimes using it to electrocute your enemies. The developer spared no expense in making it utterly drinkable for the eyes. You're going to need a decent rig to get everything looking just right in BioShock, but even more modest systems can provide a fantastic experience once you knock down a few settings.

We used the third-party FRAPs video program to benchmark BioShock because the game doesn't have a built-in test. We created a 30-second run through Rapture's medical facilities for our test. The tour passes through wide-open spaces (or, at least, as wide as they get in BioShock), small corridors, and dark, shadow-ridden rooms. Between these varied environments the test run should be a fair representation of the game.

We've divided our guide into four main sections that have the biggest impact on game performance: game settings, video cards, processors, and system memory.

Game Settings
There are definitely a few settings you should tweak if you don't have an up-to-date computer. You can reclaim a lot of performance if you're willing to make a few compromises. Fortunately, the game still looks fantastic at even the lowest-quality settings. We enabled and disabled each setting to see how they affected frame rates, and we've also taken graphics-comparison shots to show you what they do.

Graphics
There's no getting around it: BioShock demands a good video card. The minimum specs require at least a GeForce 6600 GT, but we'd recommend going few notches higher. Find out how the game performs across a variety of video cards, and in Windows Vista with DirectX 10.

CPU
We've found that BioShock benefits from multicore processors. If you're on an aging Pentium 4 or a slower Athlon 64, you might have something to worry about.

Memory
BioShock requires 1GB of memory according to the developer, but we tested the game with 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB of RAM to see how much memory the game really needs to function. The game does load with 512MB of system memory, but the resultant chugging makes the game almost unplayable.

Sample System Performance

We put together a few sample systems to show how the game performed using real-world computers. Our aging 2.4GHz Pentium 4 system barely managed to run the game at higher graphics settings. We had to knock the graphical settings down to medium and set the resolution to 800x600 to get the game in a playable state. Our single-core AMD Athlon 64 4000+ with Radeon X1650 XT gave us a decent experience at lower resolutions, but we did notice that the system took a bit longer to load textures, which often froze us for a few seconds when we entered new areas. The dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60 paired with the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB performed very well, and the game was more than playable at 1280x1024 with high-quality settings. Both of our Intel Core 2 setups paired with GeForce 8800 series cards had no issues whatsoever running BioShock. We cranked up the resolution and the settings with nary a hiccup.

Game Settings

Unless you have a top-of-the-line computer, you're going to have to relax some of the settings to get adequate performance in BioShock. The game's strong art design still makes the game look great even if you disable most of the advanced graphics settings. As usual, enabling shadows takes a bite out of your frame rates. Consider disabling High Detail Shaders next. However, the shaders add a tremendous amount of detail to the game, so you might want to trade off and drop the resolution a notch or two before you lose shaders.

You can also opt to use BioShock's preset quality settings--high, medium, and low. High, as expected, leaves all the settings enabled, and low disables pretty much everything, while at the same time enabling Force Global Lighting, which actually reduces the quality of lighting in the game. According to the manual, Global Lighting disables shadows for characters and dynamic objects, as well as enabling "a one-pass inaccurate lighting method." The medium setting disables High Detail Shaders and Real Time Reflections, and takes the sliders for textures and actor detail down to medium. Check out our image comparison shots on the next page to see each graphics setting in action.

Image Quality Comparison

High Quality vs. Medium Quality