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.
- 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.