The visuals too will constantly amaze, from finely detailed industrial structures to the weapon models, the choices of which areas to light and which to leave in the dark, and plasmid effects. And then there's the water. It's so gorgeous, rippling and gurgling through every one of Rapture's hallways, tumbling from ceilings and, of course, encasing the city itself. You get lots of little details to enjoy as well, like the welts on your hand when you boot up the insect swarm plasmid, the steam jets that hiss from Big Daddies after they've taken damage, fish in tanks and in the ocean that dart away as you approach, and the flickering billboards and tattered posters that remain from Rapture's glory days. 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.
