Prey has been in development for many years but the folks at Human Head finally released the game this year. The game utilizes the
Doom 3 engine like
Quake 4 and features the really cool Portal technology to garner some interesting game play aspects. All settings were set to maximum and three resolutions were chosen for the test.
Company of Heroes is an RTS that really pushes video cards. The game by the fine folks at Relic Entertainment is set in WWII and features deformable terrain as well as great physics. The level of detail in the game for an RTS is amazing. For the tests, we set everything at maximum or ultra to ensure that the card was taxed as much as possible
Half-Life 2 is Valve's sequel to the mega hit that just keeps on going. The game features incredible physics and highly detailed graphics. A scene near the beach with attacking ant lions was used to test this card along with setting the graphics at maximum.
When compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX at 1600x1200, you can see in all games other than Quake 4 where it is CPU bound the GeForce 8600 GTS shows how much slower it is. Although there are some titles that do run well with the card such as Half-Life 2. Considering the card is more than half the price you can see that for the most part the performance falls in line. The card does support DirectX 10 though so once games start coming out that use that feature we can see if this card is really getting more bang for the buck.
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