Prototype: Titanium Engine
Radical Entertainment's own engine is called Titanium and is DirectX 9 only. The Multi Pass Renderer uses Forward and Deferred Shading techniques as well as more than 170 Fragment Shaders. The game also heavily utilizes different Level of Details (LOD) and this allows huge maps (Open world) with huge numbers of NPCs. An adaptive animation system causes movement in reference to the situation - for example of your Alter Ego, Alex Mercer, jumps over cars passing by. The developers are also proud of their physics engine: It allows you to interact with many of the objects available in the levels and offers Ragdoll and many particles like bursting windows, bumps in cars or big explosions.

According to Radical Entertainment the cross platform engine is scaling very well with multi-core CPUs. Animations, sound effects, the particle system, the character skinning, the physics and the collision model are running in individual threads.

Prototype: Minimal system requirements
• OS: Windows XP SP3
• GPU: Geforce 7800 GT / Radeon X1800 (Shader Model 3.0 and 256 MiByte)
• CPU: Core 2 Duo with 1.86 GHz / Athlon 64 X2 4000+
• RAM: 1 GiByte (XP) / 2 GiByte (Vista)
• HDD: 8 GiByte

An interesting fact is the limitation of selectable screen resolutions in association to the available amount of video memory. With a 256 MiByte card you can select 1,280 x 800 pixels at max, while 512 MiByte VRAM already allow resolutions up to 2,560 x 1,600 pixels.

Prototype: Benchmark sequence and results
For our benchmarks we record the framerate of a 60 second sequence on the Time Square. Each processor has to run the scene three times and we take the average result. With a huge number of NPCs and vehicles this scenario is quite challenging for the CPUs.

In comparison to a C2D E6600 (2x 2.4 GHz) the quad-core pendant, the C2Q Q6600 (4x 2.4 GHz), is about 53 percent faster. The Titanium Engine also likes higher frequencies and extra Level 2 Cache: A C2D E8400 (2x 3.0 GHz) is about 35 percent faster than the C2D E6600. The percentaged difference between the Phenom II X3 720 BE and the Phenom II X4 940 BE is bigger than the additional 200 MHz of the 940 BE can be made responsible for, so Prototype benefits from the additional core. The Core i7-920 is running Prototype slightly faster than the Phenom II X4 940 BE and thus is a little slower than the C2Q Q9650. The Core i7.975 XE is in front of all the other CPUs, but is also slowed down by the Geforce GTX 285 - the developers themselves already said that the graphics card can become a bottleneck fast.

PC Games Hardware tests Intel Core i7 CPUs with SMT but without Turbo Mode. Energy saving modes (C1E/EIST/Cool'n'quiet) are deactivated in all tests. All Athlon 64 (K8) are running with DDR2-800. If not stated otherwise the latencies for DDR2 are 5-5-5-18 and 7-7-7-21 for DDR3.