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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 mothership 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.
Bummer, we had an issue with this game. I have seen the other sites produce really good results yet some sort of bug is haunting us. We tried two test systems, the full version, the demo, another timedemo yet 8xAA-SLI will not work for me. Interestingly enough 4xAA does and with 83 FPS @ 2560x1600 that surely does not suck.
Half-Life 2
Your mission is to save the planet from total alien supremacy. See, that petite incident in Black Mesa was just the beginning: now those pesky Xen invaders and a new threat called the Combine have spread across the whole Earth, causing massive amounts of death and destruction. Its up to you to set things right.
The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2s lighting seems a lot more "natural". Let me put it like this, Doom 3s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2s lighting is just "accepted" by the eye as lights reflect, and create shadows with precision streaming through windows with an unnerving realism.
For HL2 we recorded our own timedemo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.
And yes again we see the game scale really well. At 2560x1600 we need to stick at 16xAA, which looks breathtaking!
Lost Coast
Valve recently released a new HL2 level in the form of Half Life 2: Lost Coast. Go download it as it'll show and amaze you what HDR can do. The difference is obvious. HDR means High Dynamic Range. HDR facilitates the use of color values way beyond the normal range of the color palette in an effort to produce a more extreme form of lighting rendering. Typically this trick is used to contrast really dark scenery. Extreme sunlight, over-saturation or over exposure is a good example of what exactly is possible. The most simple way to describe it would be controlling the amount of light used present in a certain position in a 3D scene.
I had no more time for comparative results with a single GX2 card yet is scales the same as Half-Life 2 itself. HDR simply takes a larger performance hit and that's pretty much all there is to it. Both 8x and 16xAA can be used at 2560x1600, which is a truly stunning experience.
