Test System And Benchmark Settings

Right out of the gate, Prototype is not an ideal benchmarking candidate. The title has no built-in benchmarking tool, and to make matters worse, every time a saved game is loaded the player is placed at the same position on the map, but at a different time of day. Because of this, every benchmark run has its own unique rendering challenges. The map is also populated differently on each load, with helicopters, enemies, tanks, cars, and people in different locations, so no two benchmark runs are the same. We must keep this in mind when interpreting the results, so as not to assign too much significance to minor differences.

Note that we used two test systems: a Core i7-920-based system for the majority of the benchmarks and a Core 2 Quad Q6600-based system to demonstrate what slower CPU architecture, lower clock speeds, and fewer CPU cores would provide in the way of performance.

Once again, we chose a range of graphics cards from our “Best Graphics Cards for the Money” monthly recommendations for our tests. This gives us a nice broad spectrum of cards to scrutinize from a range of budgets. The only note here is that our Radeon HD 4870 benchmarks were performed by underclocking a reference Radeon HD 4890 down to Radeon HD 4870 speeds, which should deliver reference Radeon HD 4870 performance (as the Radeon HD 4890 is essentially an overclocked Radeon HD 4870).