World in Conflict - Open beta performance analysis

The fact that this title currently holds a place on our 'most anticipated games in 2007' poll should tell you pretty much all you need to know about World in Conflict - Massive Entertainment's realitime strategy title is one that is having a close eye kept on it by both gamers and pixel whores like myself alike.  The possibilities of the game's Cold War gone crazy scenario, putting you in charge of a United States army desperately trying to defend its homeland from a full-scale Soviet invasion, are more than a little mouth-watering, and offer an exciting change of military pace from all those World War II-based titles such as Company of Heroes.  Meanwhile the games graphical capabilities, including DirectX 10 rendering functionality, makes for both an impressive looking and strenuous visual experience for even the most capable GPUs currently available.

The really great news is that, if you're on tenderhooks waiting for the release of this game, you can enjoy some early time with this title thanks to the release of an open multi-player beta, which runs from the 11th to the 31st of July - All you need to do is fill in the form on Intel's Geek Out web site, and you're signed up and ready to download the beta via BitTorrent.

If that isn't exciting enough, this open beta also contains a built-in benchmarking mode for the game, utilising a run-through of what basically amounts to a real-world scenario in the game.  Of course, Elite Bastards being Elite Bastards, we jumped at this opportunity, and wasted no time in getting the beta installed on our test rig so that we can put all of the latest DirectX 10 graphics boards through their paces in both the games DirectX 9 and 10 rendering paths.

So, just how do all these boards fare against the graphical luxuries of World in Conflict?  How does DirectX 10 performance and image quality stack up against the DirectX 10 rendering path?  Will I stop blathering on and get on with the article?  Well, the last of those questions I can answer straight away - Yes, I will.