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X3 - Reunion

The makers of X Beyond the Frontier and X2 Egosoft bring you yet another space combat game X3. When you look at X3 you feel like you're right in the middle of a science - fiction movie. The game has stunning visual effects, which give some amazing views of the world where Julian Brenan (protagonist) belongs. Julian, who is the son of Kyle Brenan from X2, who helps Julian in his extraordinary journey in a galaxy far away from planet earth. X3 scores high on the graphics and visual aspects, which are of real high quality. The impressive space scenes are hard to miss. The ships are much more sleek and smarter then the ones in X2.You will find the visual effects to be spectacular. However, most of this action is restricted to the cockpit of the space ship and this tends to be a little disappointing, as you are involved in all the action only through the drivers seat.

X3: Reunion is mind-bogglingly beautiful. I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of simply looking at my surroundings while flying from one mission to another. Explosion effects and battle scenes also leave little to be desired as even the pickiest of gamers will simply drool over the graphics.

Shader model 3 is supported (and enabled).

X3 is a reasonably new benchmark for us. From a graphics oriented view this really is one of the best looking games ever. The average framerate is based upon four large timedemo's which form the result.

We enabled four levels of AA and sixteen levels of Anisotropic filtering here and are measuring at 1920x1200. With an average of 39 rendered frames per second we are well within the safe zone of comfortable gameplay

Again; that's impressive for 200 bucks.

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.

First off (and I simply wanted to do this pointless results with one game) Trilinear filtering and no AA only results as shown above. You can push up to 2560x1600 actually. Now why did I do this? Look at the results below and try to understand how little of a performance impact 4xAA and 16xAF have these days. This is all about architectural efficiency and so darn remarkable to see.

Above, what you are looking at are the results at 4xAA and 16xAF with all possible image IQ settings to high in-game. With these settings typically with a previous-gen enthusiast graphics card you'd stick at a resolution up to 1920x1200. You can do it with the Galaxy GS as well !