Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra

Prey

Publisher: 2K Games

We used the full retail version of Prey, patched to version 1.3. The game, developed by Humanhead Studios, is based on an enhanced version of the Doom 3 engine. It features many unique gameplay features including gravity flipping and gravity walking -- these allow you to walk on walls or ceilings, making for some very interesting gameplay. Because of these features, it's very easy to get disorientated whilst playing the Prey on a big screen.

On the graphics front, the engine is based on OpenGL and supports bump mapping, dynamic shadowing, glow effects, particle effects, specular lighting, skinning and high-quality textures. Although the Doom 3 engine is almost three years old, it still looks pretty stunning -- that's a testament to how well the Doom 3 engine has aged.

For our testing, we used a demo from the Salvage level, which incorporates all of the effects we've discussed above. Based on our experiences, we found that the Salvage level was the most intense level in the game, so it should serve well as a 'worst case' scenario in this title.

We set the in-game quality settings to their highest selectable options, leaving vsync disabled. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled inside the game via the command line, but there is the option to select them in the game's display options menus.


The performance gap between the Ultra and the GTX steadily improved with the increased resolution. By the time we reached 2560x1600 4xAA, the gap grew to just over 10 percent. At these settings, it’s really a two-horse race between the GTX and the Ultra, as the nearest competitor is some 64 percent slower than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. Based on the fact that the GeForce GTX has around 50 percent more shader horsepower than the 8800 GTS, it’s fair to say that Prey is pretty shader heavy.