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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.

What you are looking at are the results at 4xAA and 16xAF with all possible image IQ settings to high in-game. 75 FPS at 1920x1200 with such AA and AF settings certainly does not suck.

Far Cry

Far Cry's story centers on Jack Carver, who has put a mysterious past behind him in favor of a less stressful life chartering boats in the South Pacific... or so he thinks. After delivering a female journalist to an uncharted island, Jack's boat is attacked and he subsequently finds himself stranded against a group of mercenaries, at which point his adventure begins. Graphically Far Cry is amazing; the action takes place in a huge, brightly colored environment with dense jungle style shrubbery, peacefully quiet beaches and large indoor areas. The excellent shadow effects simply bring the game to life with reflections on walls and even on your own weapons as you creep through the trees. Its like something straight out of a movie, helped along by the lighting and tight, crisp textures.  

For Far Cry we did things a bit different then normal. First off, the game has been patched to version 1.33. Secondly where possible we made sure that the graphics cards were forced to run Shader Model 3.0 if possible. Next to that we are using our own Guru3D.com constructed timedemo to prevent driver cheats.

The results (frames per second) that you see below are a lot lower then in normal conditions as we modified configuration settings and make it as rough as it can get on the graphics card. All in all, at this time and moment, this is one of the best tests we can offer you to benchmark DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards.

The framerate is measured over an intensive shader rich timedemo with a custom Guru3D.com written configuration file with everything maxed out. We see really good performance at all resolutions. This game is at 16xAF with HDR level 7 (highest possible HDR effects).

We again see great performance up-to 2048x1536 after which memory size starts to count again and the 640 MB GTS takes over with a good margin.

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 we enabled it. Four AA samples and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering are also enabled here with every possible IQ setting at high.