Vampires the Masquerade: Bloodlines

The game is designed basing on a well-known gaming environment and represents a mixture of RPG and third-person shooter. The graphics quality in Bloodlines is pretty high. We believe that the characters boast the highest quality and level of detail in this game, because their mimics and face expressions are not any worse than what we saw in Half-Life 2. Nothing surprising actually. This project is based on Source engine by valve Software. Unfortunately, unlike Half-Life 2 this game doesn?t contain any integrated testing tools, so we had to use FRAPS utility again here.

Just like in Half-Life 2, the performance in Bloodlines is often very dependent on the system CPU. It is especially evident when the hero is walking along the city streets, which seems to be the most frequent situation in this game at first sight. Besides that we have also faced the same problem as in Counter-Strike Source: all NVIDIA cards with PCI Express interface ran extremely slowly unlike their counterparts with AGP interface. The problem seems to be connected either with our test platform, or with the drivers. In the nearest future, we are going to find this out and to see if we can eliminate it.

In high resolutions in eye candy mode we can already speak about the performance difference between various graphics accelerators. The best results here belong to RADEON X800 graphics card family, which corresponds nicely to the results obtained in Half-Life 2 on the d3_c17_02 level. In the mainstream segment, the winner is, on the contrary, GeForce 6600 GT AGP. GeForce FX graphics cards are surprisingly fast here, too. But they most probably work in DirectX 8.1 mode, which explains this success of theirs.