Page 19 - Half Life 2

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.

Of course the AMD 64 4000+ system that we are using today is not exactly the slowest system on the globe but at 10x7 we clearly see CPU limitation. Although the 7800 GTX is close to the Radeon x850 XT PE I must say that this is a very good result. Half-life 2 always has been in favor of Radeon cards bigtime.

Now, I say this because I want you to see what happens when we enable 4xAA and 8x AF see below.

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At 10x7 we see still see 103 frames per second on average for the G70 even with 4x antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic filtering, that is 0% performance loss over the default settings people, look at the above chart again. In 1280x1024 we see a 6 frame difference and still do an average of 97 FPS. And then we look at 1600x1200, the Godfather of all gaming modes... 86 FPS, wow.

Once more chart, see below:

Rigth I included some extra performance results. To your left, the default score. Then we overclock and since this game is CPU limited we hardly see a difference!

Then we have a look at Transparent Antialiasing enabled in both the Multi- and supersampled modes as discussed earlier in out technology bit. As you can see it definitely has an effect on performance, yet minimal, very minimal. The last results to your right show off the performance once we go extreme and enable 8xS antialiasing and my favorite, 16 levels of anisotropic filtering with the end results of all gaming resolutions being playable.

Truly fantastic, and extremely playable. For those interested, you can read our own full HL2 review right here.
BTW our cheapest on-line price for Half-Life 2 is