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 | |||
- 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.