
Playing Radical Entertainment's new action title Prototype will give you a hint of what immortality must feel like. You control Alex Mercer, a man who is transformed into a creature that is in command of his genetic makeup. He is able to survive almost anything and can physically alter himself to accomplish whatever he chooses. He can leap up buildings in a few bounds, glide above the skyline with ease, run over anything, morph into a disguise, pick up huge objects and chuck them like pebbles, and transform himself into any number of deadly weapons. It's almost impossible to feel like your character is ever in any real jeopardy as you can simply evade faster than your pursuers can chase, and if you choose to allow them to engage you, the enemies don't seem to pose any real threat. At least, that is the case in the beginning levels.
This game doesn't necessarily steer you into a benevolent or a malevolent role, as the ultimate power the game bestows upon you is one of ambivalence. As a player, I found myself struggling to maintain a shred of the character's humanity by sparing innocent lives when I could. The game makes it pretty much impossible to avoid civilian casualties, and it certainly doesn't reward you for it. If anything, it's a lot easier to play with indifference, and there is certainly an ugly fun to be had when sacrificing the population to make for an easier out when a strike team attacks you. A quick way to regenerate health is to “absorb” people, and if there aren't any enemies around, then the citizenry makes for an easy snack.
The game takes place in Manhattan, and it amuses me that one of the lead character's main traits (his loss of humanity) reminds me of the Doctor Manhattan character from the Watchmen. Aside from this, the setting provides a huge sandbox for our anti-hero to play in, including bonus challenges all over the map.
Scattered throughout the city you'll find characters that are part of the “web of intrigue,” which is a clever device to narrate the story. If you absorb these characters, you see short movie clips of their memories and another piece of the puzzle to help you understand Alex's history and situation. This helps a great deal as Alex is suffering from amnesia at the beginning of the game, so the player joins him in his discovery of who he is and why he has his powers.
The title also includes a bit of a role-playing game (RPG) element in that the player can choose how to upgrade Alex's abilities by making purchases with accrued experience points.
Is it fun? At times deliciously so, although with great power comes the potential for great indifference. If you're intrigued enough to give the game a try, you might want to know what hardware you need to get the most out of Prototype. That's our mission here today.
There are only two detail controls in Prototype: Graphic Quality and Shadow. Each has a low, medium, and high setting.

On the low setting, shadows are nonexistent, which really flattens out the landscape and removes depth from the game world. The distance at which objects like cars are rendered using low-detail models is fairly close to the player's point of view. Only at the closest ranges are high-detail models displayed. For example, look at how the detail of the automobiles drops off as the distance increases from the viewpoint.

At medium detail we see shadows, which immediately increases the graphical fidelity of the game world quite a bit. The distance at which the game reverts to low-detail models is somewhat improved, with the high-detail models remaining farther from the viewpoint.

High detail increases the shadow resolution, but it doesn't make all that much of a visual difference compared to the medium setting. Objects are also rendered with high-detail models at increased ranges from the viewpoint, although, in the distance, low-detail models can still be seen.
Unfortunately, from the rooftops, even the high graphics quality setting isn't sufficient to prevent the camera from seeing the hard line where the streets & cars revert to a flat texture instead of 3D models. However, this drawback isn't very noticeable during game play.
All things considered, Prototype certainly doesn't reach for the leading edge where graphics are concerned, as it looks more like a title from a year or two ago rather than an A-list game in 2009. It's not particularly ugly, but there are a few places where low-resolution textures and overly-simple prop models bring down the fidelity. In general, the lighting model is a little outdated as well, with shadows completely missing from certain situations even when the highest detail level is selected. Having said that, when you're enjoying the game's action, the visuals are good enough so that these things won't detract from the fun.
We scrutinized both GeForce and Radeon screen captures and came to the following conclusion: the image quality is close between the two competitors, but the Nvidia drivers and hardware generate darker shadows than their ATI counterparts, which is a difference we also observed in our Burnout Paradise analysis.

Which is better? That's certainly subjective. And to be honest, we didn't notice the difference until we directly compared screenshots. After we realized the difference, we noticed that the Nvidia cards would give us nice depth when the sun was in a position to provide good shadows. Alternatively, when we were deep within the cityscape and under the shadows of buildings, the Nvidia cards delivered a darker city with less contrast and definition compared to the Radeon cards.

However, neither of these issues is a game-changer. And as we said above, we never really noticed them until we directly compared the screenshots. We'd be happy to play the game on either camp's hardware from an image quality point of view.
But what about performance? To answer that question, let's move on to the benchmarks.
Right out of the gate, Prototype is not an ideal benchmarking candidate. The title has no built-in benchmarking tool, and to make matters worse, every time a saved game is loaded the player is placed at the same position on the map, but at a different time of day. Because of this, every benchmark run has its own unique rendering challenges. The map is also populated differently on each load, with helicopters, enemies, tanks, cars, and people in different locations, so no two benchmark runs are the same. We must keep this in mind when interpreting the results, so as not to assign too much significance to minor differences.
Note that we used two test systems: a Core i7-920-based system for the majority of the benchmarks and a Core 2 Quad Q6600-based system to demonstrate what slower CPU architecture, lower clock speeds, and fewer CPU cores would provide in the way of performance.
Once again, we chose a range of graphics cards from our “Best Graphics Cards for the Money” monthly recommendations for our tests. This gives us a nice broad spectrum of cards to scrutinize from a range of budgets. The only note here is that our Radeon HD 4870 benchmarks were performed by underclocking a reference Radeon HD 4890 down to Radeon HD 4870 speeds, which should deliver reference Radeon HD 4870 performance (as the Radeon HD 4890 is essentially an overclocked Radeon HD 4870).
| Graphic Test System | CPU Test System | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7-920 (Nehalem), | Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Kentsfield), | ||
| Motherboard | ASRock X58 Supercomputer | MSI P7N SLI Platinum | ||
| Networking | Onboard Realtek Gigabit LAN controller | Onboard nForce 750i Gigabit Ethernet | ||
| Memory | Mushkin PC3-10700 | A-Data Extreme DDR2 800+ | ||
| Graphics | Sapphire HD4650 512 MB DDR2 PCIe | Asus ENGTX260 796 MB DDR3 PCIe | ||
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar WD50 00AAJS-00YFA, | Western Digital Caviar WD50 00AAJS-00YFA, | ||
| Power | Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W | Ultra HE1000X | ||
| Software and Drivers | ||||
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit 6.0.6001, SP1 | |||
| DirectX version | DirectX 10 | |||
| Graphics Drivers | Nvidia GeForce 186.18, Catalyst 9.6 | |||
Low detail means no shadows, which in many games would significantly detract from game play quality. But this not the case with Prototype. While shadows add nice depth to the landscape, turning them off isn't all that noticeable while you're playing the game. If your hardware demands it, low detail is a viable option.

Starting at 1280x1024, every card we've tested offers extremely playable performance. In fact, only the lowest-priced card in our tests, the Radeon HD 4650, delivers less than an average of 70 frames per second (FPS). It is extremely telling that the sub-$100 GeForce 9600 GT is achieving frame rates close to the $260+ GeForce GTX 260. This smells like a CPU bottleneck, which is not a big surprise at low detail and resolutions. It's even more expected since this is a sandbox-type game that undoubtedly makes the system work hard to calculate artificial intelligence for the scores of people, cars, and enemies populating Manhattan.

At 1680x1050, only the Radeon HD 4650 has been dragged down to the edge of playability. All of the other cards are still bumping into what is likely the CPU bottleneck.

At 1920x1200, we're starting to see some separation between the cheaper cards and more expensive models. The Radeon HD 4650 has been rendered unplayable.

Finally, at 2560x1600, the Radeon HD 4650 is reduced to a slideshow, while all of the other cards are delivering very smooth performance. While the GeForce 9600 GT is notably slower than the rest of the pack, it's still able to muster a minimum frame rate of about 27 FPS, which is not perfect, but very playable.
Medium detail affords us the luxury of shadows. In addition, the game will swap high-detail 3D props (like the cars) for low-detail versions of the same props when the object is farther away from the player's viewpoint when compared to the low-detail setting. Because of the inclusion of shadows, if your graphics card can handle it, we highly recommend the medium detail setting at the very least.

We begin with 1280x1024, and can see that the Radeon HD 4650 is already out of the running as a contender with its minimum frame rate of 22 FPS. The game is playable, but it's far from ideal. Meanwhile, all of the other cards are once again bottlenecked by the CPU. Only the GeForce 9600 GT is struggling to reach the average 65-75 FPS the other cards enjoy.

Upping the resolution to 1680x1050, the situation remains the same.

Even at 1920x1200, the CPU bottleneck is asserting itself as the primary performance limitation instead of the graphics cards.

At 2560x1600 we can see some definite leaders and followers in the range, but the margins are still surprisingly close. The GeForce 9600 GT has been slowed to choppy performance, but all of the higher-tier cards are averaging over 40 FPS and about 30 FPS minimum, which is still very smooth.
At this point, it is obvious that the game is extremely dependant on the speed of the platform and not on the speed of the graphics system. As long as a minimum level of graphics power is available, performance is very close across the spectrum.
High detail increases shadow resolution and clarity. The game also swaps in high-detail 3D props (like the cars) for low-detail versions of the same props when the object is farther away from the player's viewpoint when compared to the medium detail setting.




These results are so incredibly close to the medium-detail results on the previous page that we don't have anything new to say. The only conclusion we can offer is that there is no real justification to use the medium-detail settings, because the high-detail setting brings no tangible performance penalty.
Finally, we will add 4x anti-aliasing (AA) to the mix. If anything will separate the men from the boys, it's AA.
Both the Radeons and GeForces demonstrate a similar level of quality when 4x AA is enabled:

Here we see the CPU limitation we're so used to in this game. The Radeon HD 4650 is knocked out of the competition, but the rest of the cards are still in the game.

At 1680x1050, we're beginning to see a slight advantage trend in favor of the ATI cards.

At 1920x1200, the Radeons increasingly show their strength when AA is enabled. The GeForce 9600 GT is still demonstrating playable performance, but for some reason the GeForce 8800 GT sample is struggling, even though we re-ran the tests to see if it was an anomaly.

At the highest 2560x1600 resolution, we're seeing some problems. At first glance I wondered if some cards were suffering from some sort of driver glitch, but Chris Angelini pointed out the elephant in the room: all of the cards that failed to produce playable performance at this setting are the 512 MB cards. The 796 MB and 1 GB cards are all able to produce much higher performance numbers at this high resolution with 4x anti-aliasing. In any case, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB walks away with a win as the only single card we've tested that is powerful enough to play the game at this resolution and AA level smoothly. The GeForce GTX 260 is on the razor's edge of playability and could be used at these settings if the player found it acceptable.
The previous performance benchmarks have demonstrated a massive CPU dependency with similar peak frame rates across the board, regardless of the resolution. Let's see how the older Core 2 Quad stacks up against the Core i7 in this game:

This is absolutely surprising. The Core i7 CPU is favored, of course, but look at the massive discrepancy between the i7 and the Core 2 Quad. This is very rare in the PC game industry, as usually games are much more graphics-dependent than this, and a Core 2 Quad will deliver frame rates much closer to its i7 successor. Note the clock speed change and subsequent performance penalty. This game will take all of the CPU power it can get.

Once again, Prototype uses all of the platform's resources it can and shows a slight loss in performance with the reduction of each CPU core and its associated cache. When the CPU is reduced from two to one available core, dramatic performance loss occurs.
What has our Prototype performance analysis taught us? First and foremost, we learned that this title values CPU speed and architecture over graphics prowess. Based on our testing, a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad performed less than half as fast as a Core i7 at 2.66 GHz. This means that, for playable performance, the Core i7 CPU is an ideal companion to Prototype, but if you're planning to play it on something different, you should target a quad-core Core 2 Quad or Phenom II in the 2.5 GHz or faster range. A dual-core Core 2 Duo or Phenom II-based CPU might do the trick, but you'd ideally want something in the neighborhood of 3 GHz.

Because this game title is so CPU-dependent, the graphics subsystem doesn't have the pronounced effect on performance we've come to expect. The silver lining is that even a GeForce 9600 GT or Radeon HD 4830 will deliver great performance compared to more expensive solutions. When AA is applied, you might prefer a Radeon graphics card for resolutions of 1920x1200 or higher. But below that, most GeForce cards performed very smoothly as well.
We were a little surprised to see such a high CPU dependency, but frankly we don't benchmark a lot of sandbox-style games, so perhaps this is par for the course. In the meantime, we'll be exploring Alex Mercer's Manhattan, trying to find out exactly what it was that turned him into such a powerful badass.








