Prey

Prey shares with Duke Nukem Forever and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl the dubious fame of one of the longest-under-development projects. This sci-fi shooter was announced back in 1997, but the developer completely forgot about the project afterwards. However, Prey survived eventually and is scheduled for a July 11, 2006 release.

In brief, this game is a sci-fi shooter utilizing a greatly modified Doom 3 engine with an Indian as the main character. Prey features high-quality, even though not outstanding, visual effects and surely deserves a place in our reviews.

The GeForce 7900 GT is a little slower than the Radeon X1900 XT and is far ahead of the Radeon X1900 GT, which in its turn is faster than the Radeon X1800 XL but slower than the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB. The PowerColor X1900 XT provides what seems to be close to a comfortable speed in 1024x768, but it should be noted that the GeForce 7900 GT cannot deliver a comfortable average and minimum frame rate in the higher resolutions, either. At least this is true for the full-screen antialiasing mode.

The demo version of Prey we used in this review doesn’t offer integrated benchmarking options, so we had to measure the frame rate with the Fraps utility. It means the results may be somewhat inaccurate since it’s hard to repeat exactly the same sequence of the player’s actions.

Quake 4

Quake 4 makes use of stencil shadows the GeForce 6/7 architectures have a special technology, called UltraShadow II, to accelerate the rendering of. So, it is no surprise that the GeForce 7900 GT feels much better here than its young opponent. You can see that the Radeon X1800 XL with 16 pixel processors, TMUs, Z-units and ROPs has nearly the same speed as the Radeon X1900 GT whose main advantage – 36 pixel processors – isn’t called for in this game.

Even the increased GPU and memory frequencies cannot help the new card. It cannot deliver a normal speed in 1600x1200 with enabled full-screen antialiasing. Its results are on the verge of being acceptable even in 1280x1024, unlike the Radeon X1800 XT’s.