Prey Performance And Optimization Guide With The AMD Radeon RX 580

Prey is a must-play for anyone interested in a deep, engaging, story-driven single-player affair with heaps of replayability, alternate endings, and play styles to explore. For anyone bummed about the demise of Human Head's Prey 2, fear not. This version of Prey has cemented itself as a new high water-mark for what a reboot can be.
Before we wrap things up though, lets talk about our experience with the game and AMD's GPUs, and offer some suggestions for optimization. We ran into no glitches, choppy gameplay or other unsavory behavior from the game, "out of the box," so to speak. In fact, its refreshing to see such silky performance from a brand new triple-A title on affordable hardware like the AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB. 

There are, however, a few minor adjustments that can further improved performance. To reduced the severity and frequency of framerate dips, you can easily dial down a couple key settings when using the "Very High" preset. We observed that SMAA 1XT with Textures taken down to "High" will give you a few extra frames per second, and keep things above 60 FPS more reliably at 1440p. Obviously, you can dial things back further to send performance even higher, but this minor tweak was all that was necessary to keep the game experience smooth and performance north of 60 FPS, without compromising much at all in terms of in-game image quality.

To see another 10-15% in performance we suggest taking Object Detail down a notch to High as well. Additionally bring down both Screen Space Directional Occlusion and Screen Space Reflections to Half Resolution. These are more demanding post-processing effects that will significantly impact performance.


Beyond that, what more can we say? There's no hyperbole with this one. Prey and the AMD Radeon RX 580 are a good match.  And further, we proved-out AMD's claims that the Radeon RX 580 is indeed a solid, appreciable upgrade over hardware that's technically only a generation back, offering nearly double the performance of the Radeon R9 380 in this game. At the RX 580's current price point, it's a good value that offers gamers an affordable 1440p experience in what could be one of this year's best and brightest titles.

* Disclosure: This article was sponsored by AMD, though test setup, performance evaluation and editorial voice were in no way affected by this sponsorship.