GeForce 7800 GS 256MB (AGP)
By:
Hilbert Hagedoorn |
Edited by | Published: February 2, 2006
Half-Life 2
Along with scientist Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, your mission is to save the planet from total alien supremacy. See, that petite incident in Black Mesa was just the beginning: now those pesky Xen invaders and a new threat called the Combine have spread across the whole Earth, causing massive amounts of death and destruction. It’s up to you to set things right.
The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3’s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2‘s lighting seems a lot more "natural"’. Let me put it like this, Doom 3’s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2’s lighting is just "accepted" by the eye as lights reflect, and create shadows with precision, streaming through windows with an unnerving realism.
For HL2 we recorded our own timedemo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.
Above is the average framerate displayed versus it's resolution with no AA or AF settings enabled.
Half-Life 2 always has been in favor of Radeon cards big-time but with the latest ForceWare drivers NVIDIA was able to close the gap. The game remains very playable on all cards even at 1600x1200 with 65 FPS.
Enabled above are 4xAA and 8x AF. You could play at 1600x1200 with 55 FPS, with these settings which of course is a great experience but most of all good value for money.
Our cheapest on-line price for Half-Life 2 is
Serious Sam 2
March 2001, developer Croteam released the original Serious Sam for the PC and pretty much made other standard first person shooters look like they were in neutral. The game, along with its stand alone follow up The Second Encounter, had an impressive graphics engine, huge outdoor environments, some wacky weapons, a fun co-op mode, and most importantly some of the numerous and strangest enemies in FPS history. When players first saw the headless bomb filled suicide attacker charging at them full blast with a blood curdling scream, they knew that this game was something special.
Four and a half years later, Croteam's turn return to the plate with Serious Sam 2 and while it's basic gameplay hasn't changed it has enough new features to make it a fun and solid follow up to the original. The graphics are also greatly improved. Like the first, there is a story in Serious Sam 2 (there are even some extended cut scenes that pull the story forward) but you can pretty much ignore this aspect. It's all about "Serious" Sam Stone going from point A to point B and blowing up everything that gets in his way.
Constantly flaunting a huge draw distance, extensive foliage, many impressive lighting effects such as refraction and even HDR, plus more than solid framerates, the Serious Engine 2 looks like a real beast.
You know .. I really am not a fan of this game and therefore did not want to buy it. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game yet .. so not the kind of game that I like. When I heard that the game supports HDR I ran to the store though ! Now above you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering. This actually is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games. With this high-level of IQ you can play the game up-to 1920x1200 easily look at that performance difference ..
The difference is so big in favor for the 7800 GS that it might actually be a driver issue. I'm not sure yet. Anyway, other reviews will point that out and I will definitely look into it. For now the results stand as after three tries the results still where similar.
Right .. I think you get the idea by now. Wanna see how this baby overclocks ? Hit the next page then.
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