BioShock - how well do mainstream cards score?

Our 3D testing with BioShock continued over the weekend. In part 1 we showed you how the game performed with a variety of high-end graphics cards. In today’s article we’re going to focus on more cost effective sub-$200 mainstream graphics cards.

The world within Rapture can at times be a very spooky place and as gamers, we naturally want to experience it all as the developer intended. Fortunately we can report that with today’s latest mainstream cards, you can do just that without making too many compromises graphically. From what we can tell so far, Irrational has done a good job of scaling BioShock to run with older and/or slower hardware, although obviously gamers with shader model 2.0 (and older) graphics cards don’t feel this way.