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.








There were no surprises in Prey – EVGA’s factory overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra was around four percent faster than the reference GeForce 8800 Ultra at 2560x1600 4xAA 8xAF, while it was nearly eight percent faster than EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO Superclock. The frame rates delivered by the card are undoubtedly the highest we’ve ever seen for a single card solution, but whether they’re more impressive than what we’ve seen before is questionable.

Considering the fact that EVGA’s card boasts a seven percent core clock increase and a ten percent shader clock improvement, we expected a bit more performance at the higher resolutions, if we’re honest.

When it comes to comparing the performance of EVGA’s 8800 Ultra to multi-GPU setups that cost the same amount of money, both the Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire and the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB SLI configurations deliver consistently higher frame rates across the board. Again though, while both CrossFire and SLI work particularly well in this title, you are going to have headaches in other titles so that additional performance is dependent on whether you’re willing to put up with the downsides that are a part of the multi-GPU game.