GENERAL SYSTEM INFORMATION

COMMENT - "Before we jump into the benchmark results we have tested each of the settings to find out which will effect performance and image quality. Performance hit under 15% is fairly minor so shadows, specular, bump maps, high quality skinning and 8x Anisotropy can be enabled without a big performance hit. The settings you might want to disable to increase performance are use glow, high particle detail, 2x and 4x Anti-Aliasing. These performance hit results should just be used as a general guide because different video cards could produce different results. The ATI x850 Pro suffers a similar performance hit to the GeForce 6600 GT when using shadows and high quality skinning. However the ATI x850 Pro delivers much less of a performance hit compared to the GeForce 6600 GT when high quality specular, use glow, high particle detail and anti-aliasing are enabled."

COMMENT - "The MSI GeForce 6600 GT runs Prey much better than expected for such a recent game. We start this benchmark using low quality settings, all of the advanced 1 and advanced 2 settings have been disabled. Using these ugly low quality settings the MSI GeForce 6600 GT is playable at all of the resolutions tested. The medium quality settings make Prey look much better. Medium quality has shadows, specular, bump maps, high quality specular and sharper bump maps with only the advanced 2 settings disabled, this time the MSI GeForce 6600 GT is playable upto 1280x1024. High Quality settings including advanced 2 effects like use glow, high particle detail, high quality skinning and 8x anisotropy have reduced the performance of the MSI GeForce 6600 GT even further and this time the MSI GeForce 6600 GT is only playable upto 1024x768."

COMMENT - "The ATI x850 Pro will run Prey without too many problems even when you consider that Prey is using the Doom engine which usually favours Nvidia video cards and not ATI. When running with low quality settings the ATI x850 Pro is perfectly playable but we wouldn't recommend this setting because it does spoil enjoyment of the game. Although the performance of the ATI x850 Pro does suffer when using medium quality settings it is playable at all resolutions tested although we would advise the use of 1280x1024 when using medium quality settings for best gameplay. The ATI x850 Pro takes a further performance hit when using high quality settings but once again the ATI x850 Pro is playable at all of the resolutions tested."

COMMENT - "The ATI x850 Pro beats the GeForce 6600 GT by approx 22% when using high quality settings, however it was a much closer result than I had expected. Prey is a fun game with excellent graphics and gameplay to match. Everyone at Ultimate Hardware can't wait to play the full game of Prey because we think it's going to be fantastic!"