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 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.








Prey performance is another strong point in the Radeon HD 2900 XT's armoury and it managed to outperform the GeForce 8800 GTS at every setting tested in single card mode. At 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF (the resolution that you're most likely to use with these cards in a game like this), both the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and 320MB cards hold their own against the Radeon HD 2900 XT, with very similar frame rates. When you increase the resolution to 2560x1600 though, the Radeon HD 2900 XT out-performs the competition by 23 percent. It's not enough to catch the GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra though, which are 21 and 33 percent faster, respectively.

CrossFire performance on the Radeon HD 2900 XT wasn't a problem at the lower resolutions despite being slower than the competition. You're really not going to see any benefit in a blind taste test when all configurations are well in excess of 100 frames per second. However, at 2560x1600 (arguably where it matters), the Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire configuration was significantly faster than the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB SLI setup.