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.

- Introduction
- Image Quality Settings
- Image Quality: Radeon Versus GeForce
- Test System And Benchmark Settings
- Benchmark Results: Low Detail
- Benchmark Results: Medium Detail
- Benchmark Results: High Detail
- Benchmark Results: High Detail With 4x Anti-Aliasing
- CPU Benchmarks: Clock Speeds And Cores
- Conclusion
At the least, it'll convince people that their older rigs -can- run it. It's basically an optimized and mostly un-buggy Web Of Shadows engine; I'd expect a 7800GT could probably run it okay.
In action it's much better than these screenshots. It pulls a lot of the same tricks MGS4 does on the PS3, where you can tell it's not actually doing that much processing but it looks like it is. Screenshots don't do the game justice because you rarely see a texture or polygon for more than a few seconds at most; in action the particle effects are actually pretty impressive.
Even saints row, which has shit for graphics, runs close to the 2gb memory limit of 32bit games all the time - so perhaps this actually uses whatever is available?
I saw this game a few weeks ago running great on a laptop that usually does inventor stuff ... I don't know what processor was in it, but I bet no more than an old dualcore T something processor
One of the best games ever BTW!!
It's not fair to compare a pc game with graphics from a pocket calculator. gta if anything sports only gameplay. Graphics aren't a selling point for that title.
I think the answer is the lack of VRAM on the 8800GT which I believe only had 512Mb where as the 9600GT has a full 1Gb which eliminated any bottlenecks when processing all those textures with 4x AA being applied.
Anyway, keep articles like these coming.
So unless this CPU is the business (which it isn't on this platform), anyone with a computer that made in the last 3 years can run this game no problem.