GGL Wire

For those of us that have seen the Xbox 360 version of BioShock in action, this news shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but the first review comparison of the PC version vs the Xbox 360 version of the title has been unleashed and it pretty much tells us what we already knew: the game looks better on the PC.

After being shown movie and trailer after trailer of BioShock prior to the demo, the game always looked beautiful. But, once we saw it in action in person, it didn’t quite look as good as those trailers. Well, maybe now we know why: The PC version was always the one on display. IGN had a chance to compare both versions and this is what they said:

For gameplay

If you’re debating which version to get, the PC version handles better. In part it’s because of the greater precision with the mouse and keyboard, but also with how the plasmids and weapons are selected. With the default settings RMB switches between the two, LMB fires, and you use the mouse wheel instead of a radial menu to select a specific plasmid or weapon. This keeps you rooted in the action to a greater degree than in the Xbox 360 version, since you don’t have to keep pausing the game. By hitting Shift you can bring up a plasmid and weapon selection screen if you so desire, but the mouse wheel scrolled through fast enough to stay useful. Note that you can’t set LMB to fire a weapon and RMB to fire a plasmid; there’s only one fire function. We also noticed the option to bind the functions “switch and fire weapon” and “switch and fire plasmid,” but when we tested it out these only switched from weapon to plasmid and back again, much like the RMB default function. All weapons and plasmids are also bound to the number and function keys, making it even easier to ensure you always have the ideal attack at the ready.

For graphics

The PC version definitely outclasses the Xbox 360, mostly because of the ability to crank the resolution to 1920 x 1200. If you’ve got a Vista rig with a DX10 card, you can expect some heightened particle effects, crisper real-time shadows, and more dynamic water, but the game looks gorgeous regardless. On our gaming PC running a Core 2 Quad processor with a GeForce 8800 GTX, and 4 GB of RAM, it ran very well, with only a few occasions of seemingly random framerate hitches. We also couldn’t find an option to switch between DX10 and DX9 modes, the game just seems to default to what’s in your system, unlike Lost Planet.