The new Aliens vs. Predator game dropped last week, and I spent a few hours with it over the weekend to get an idea of how it looks, performs, and plays overall. This is one of the titles I was really looking forward to for it's use of advanced technologies like tessellation and DirectX 11 shadow rendering. Needless to say, it's another disappointment in an ever-growing list.

I really expected this title to shine because the Alien is such a difficult being to render on common graphics hardware. They have a huge number of polygons to draw, and with light sources and shadows to calculate for each bend in their bodies, the design team really had their work cut out for them. However, they had a shortcut: DirectX 11 tessellation. Just check out this video:

 You will see an AMD logo in the bottom left-hand corner of that video, and that's because this title is one of the big ones for the ATI Radeon camp. It launched before NVIDIA could get Fermi to the public, and should be able to sell a few 5850's or 5870's for them if it does DirectX 11 correctly. However, as I've come to find out, I don't think it will work out for them.

I wanted to take some screenshots to show you what I'm talking about, but the fast-paced nature of this game makes it really difficult to capture the same scene twice. Therefore, I'm going to direct you over to PC Games Hardware for the screenshots. Check out the close up on the Alien to get the tessellation idea. With tessellation on, we get a rounder head carapace and rounder structures, however it honestly took me a few minutes of looking at the two to see all the differences. In all reality, these guys did a kick-butt job of creating the Alien out of yester-year's technology, and the DirectX 11 effects are really just a very thin layer of icing on the cake. I hate to say it, but it's nothing that you can actually notice in game play.

Advanced shadows are another DirectX 11 option that you can turn up, and another option that is really lackluster. In fact, in the detail of the screenshots from PC Games Hardware, you can see only a slight reduction in the creep of the shadows, making them a bit crisper. Again, this is certainly nothing to write home about.

The last option for us Radeon-equipped gamers is anti-aliasing, and this one always matters. You can clearly see reduced jaggies all over the scene, and gamers will certainly notice this one. However, with AA cranked up to a lowly 4x on my card, the performance dip is big enough that I had to turn it down to 2x. This is ridiculous. Any current generation card, like a Radeon 5850 or a GTX 260, should be able to turn on 4x AA for free. We shouldn't really see performance differences until 8x AA, and even then we should be able to pull this mode off. However, in AvP, we're just not getting the same performance we should. There is something very wrong in this implementation.

The last fail for ATI with this title is that any DirectX 10 card can pull off these same graphical results. Granted, it is very unstable when running on NVIDIA hardware, but that will surly be patched up in the coming months. In all reality though, you green-guys out there aren't really missing that much.

I have to wonder how well this game ported over to the Playstation and Xbox given these results. In all honesty, I have to think it looks pretty darn good. Of course those of us who can see 1080p with 4x AA will have the best experience, but will a PS3 owner really miss tessellation? Probably not. It's not like they've added in fog or papers that scatter all over the floor like PhysX brought Batman. I'd have to say this is a very evolutionary technology demo, and I can only hope that the Turbine guys do better with LOTRO. At least they don't have to worry about which features will port to a console, so they can fully utilize the technology.