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Half-Life 2
The moment the entire graphics industry was waiting for is here, after a delay or 200 one of the biggest titles in the history of PC games was released by Valve, Half-Life 2. Gameplay that should be extraordinary, sound that'll make you drool and a first time graphics experience that'll make the choice between doing the "thing" or playing this game a difficult one.

Gordon Freeman is back! 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. Its up to you to set things right.

The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2s lighting seems a lot more "natural". Let me put it like this, Doom 3s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2s 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 bigtime but with the latest ForceWare drivers NVIDIA was able to close the gap. The game remains really playable on all cards even at 1600x1200 and again we see massive CPU limitation. It's really easy to recognize. Once the scores go flat line for all graphics cards you are running into a limitation.

With CPU limitation the CPU can deliver geometric data fast enough to the graphics processor driver and therefore it can't render faster then it's capable of.

Enabled above are 4xAA and 8x AF. You could play at 1600x1200 with these settings on any of the cards without any issues, which of course is a great experience but most of all good value for money.

Both the 7600 GT & 7900 GT really surprise me in performance for the money you have to pay for it.