Valve's game uses their own Source engine to produce some impressive results especially giving us such features as HDR and some great physics. The Lost Coast demo was used in the benchmark with all settings set at maximum. Three resolutions were selected for this test as well.
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.
The Sapphire Radeon X1300 XT Overclock Edition manages to handle itself pretty well against a card that's priced about $30 more. For those on a budget, this card gives you performance that's comparable to a higher priced card and offers up the very nice AVIVO capabilities. HTPC owners wanting to use ATI's easy conversion utility are able to do so as well. It's quiet and light on the pocketbooks. Sapphire's little overclock does help differentiate the card from the crowd. You'll have to turn down some settings to get some playable framerates out of this card, but for $99 this card is a good buy in that price range.
B-
For a budget card, you'll get some good performance and AVIVO support. I think this would do well in an HTPC as well since it's quiet and lets you use AVIVO for come video encoding.
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