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.
- 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.