Prey

Prey runs on a modified Doom 3 engine, and the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 is slower than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS just it was in Quake Wars. For the latter card, this is just a formal victory, as its average speed of 35fps is not far better than 28-29fps the ATI cards provide. There is no playing comfort in both cases since the speed will inevitably fall below comfortable level in the most complex scenes. If you want to play Prey with comfort, you need at least an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, which often proves the best solution among inexpensive mainstream graphics cards despite the arrival of DirectX 10 compatibles.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.

The ATI Radeon HD 2000 cards are still slow in this game, but the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS is no winner, either. Its average speed of about 20fps equals the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro’s minimum speed. The game will only feel really comfortable on a GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB or a more advanced graphics card.