Prey Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks

The developer of “Prey” is not unknown in the gaming community. The French Arkane Studios have been in business for decades (the author still remembers its first product “Arx Fatalis”) and it has delivered many triple-A games. In addition to “Dark Messiah of Might and Magic”, the “Dishonored” series would have to be mentioned here.

One of the biggest unique selling points of Arkane's games is their unique settings. “Prey” also has quite a bit to offer stylistically. Although the first-person shooter leans toward “BioShock” with its Art-déco indoor rooms, due to the science fiction characteristic and sometimes gloomy horror atmosphere, the game often seems to be a mixture of “Mirror's Edge Catalyst” and “Alien Isolation”.

Players are given many options to plan the line of action as they please, thanks to open levels and numerous gameplay features (crafting, hacking, upgrades, etc.). Whether sneaking around, fighting or using gimmicks strategically – “Prey” encourages experimenting and trying things out very much like “Deus Ex Mankind Divided”.

Anyone expecting a technical fiasco like “Dishonored 2” with a relatively poor performance at the beginning due to its Void engine can relax. “Prey” relies on the CryEngine by Crytek that is known for its high graphics quality (“Crysis 3”, “Ryse”, “Evolve”, etc.).

In the case of “Prey”, the technological state remains far behind the current possibilities. Many textures look blurry and cannot always serve with a high degree of details even in the maximum level (greetings from the recently tested “Dawn of War 3”). Unlike other games, we did not find this disturbing because the graphic style is so endearing that it is easy to ignore the weak textures. A decisive advantage of the textures' low resolution is the low requirement of resources. As we will analyze in a moment, “Prey” is surprisingly restrained for a 2017 game in terms of the power needs of the components.

Technical bugs were hardly an issue during the benchmarks and sampling sessions. Apart from occasional graphic errors (especially on transparent surfaces like glass) and two crashes, the game ran pleasantly smooth.

However, the video menu provides tuning enthusiasts with only a limited number of tweaks. There are just 7 options that hardly have an impact on the graphics in the extended tab. Generally, there is not a significant difference between minimum and maximum settings as long as anti-aliasing is activated. Unfortunately, “Prey” only supports the FXAA and SMAA post-processing variants that barely need performance but do not smooth out the image reliably. During the game we encountered many flickering objects, even in the highest level SMAA 2TX.

On the other hand, the practical presets have to be lauded. As usual, they allow adapting the overall quality in one step. Since all settings are implemented without relaunching the game (only the textures have to be reloaded briefly during a running game), the introductory videos that cannot be skipped and only run approximately 30 seconds is not a big problem. The loading times are also acceptable, and are even shorter with an SSD.