HiS Radeon X1950 Pro ICEQ3 Turbo review

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Prey

Prey tells the story of Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic stuck on a reservation going nowhere. Abducted along with his people to a menacing mother ship orbiting Earth, he sets out to save himself and his girlfriend and eventually his planet.

In Prey, players enter a living spaceship that enslaves alien races and devours humans for lunch. Prey turns the first-person-shooter genre upside-down with new gameplay features like wall-walking and gravity flipping, making for intense single- and multiplayer experiences. Prey is built on a heavily modified version of Doom 3 engine and is developed by Human Head Studios under the direction of 3D Realms.

Look at the results and try to understand how little of a performance impact 4xAA and 16xAF have these days. What you are looking at are the results at 4xAA and 16xAF with all possible image IQ settings to high in-game.

Half Life 2: Episode One

There's a wonderful new team dynamic at work in Episode One, thanks to the fact that Alyx battles alongside you throughout most of the episode. After playing on your own throughout Half-Life and Half-Life 2, it's refreshing to have a companion by your side, and Valve takes advantage of this by throwing you into situations where you must rely on teamwork to survive. Alyx is a capable assistant (perhaps almost too capable, since it's pretty tough to kill her off, and she seemingly has unlimited ammo), and she's often the difference between victory and defeat in many encounters, as she'll cover your back while you're busy trying to sort out the puzzle. Visually, Episode One introduces a lot of subtle improvements and enhancements in the Source engine, keeping it in line with video-card developments over the past couple of years. The new high-dynamic range lighting technology (seen only if your video card supports it) makes a big difference, as the outdoor scenes look a lot better, while indoor scenes feature impressive shadowing and atmosphere at times. Some of the textures in the game have been increased considerably, notably on Alyx and the other main characters, and the game looks incredibly sharp and with some pretty impressive HDR implementation.

AA, AF, HDR, world reflections and refractions, you name it, if it was possible to do so, we enabled it. Four AA samples and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering are also activated here with every possible IQ setting at high. If you do this at home, then you're maximum playable resolution will be 1600x1200.

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