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Half-life 2The 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 time demo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.
| Half-Life 2 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| 6600GT 128MB 4xAA 8xAF | 77 | 50 | 23 | 15 |
| 6600GT 128MB | 90 | 84 | 58 | 43 |
| x700 Pro 4xAA 8xAF | 70 | 52 | 35 | 29 |
| x700 Pro | 80 | 77 | 57 | 46 |
| 6800GT 256MB 4xAA 8xAF | 88 | 79 | 52 | 47 |
| 6800GT 256MB | 89 | 88 | 80 | 70 |
| x800XL 4xAA 8xAF | 93 | 86 | 69 | 57 |
| x800XL | 95 | 94 | 91 | 81 |
| x850XT Reference 4xAA 8xAF | 93 | 91 | 80 | 69 |
| x850XT Reference | 94 | 94 | 94 | 92 |
That is some serious performance you are witnessing here. Even the x800 XL seems to be rather CPU limited upto 1280x1024. Half-Life 2 significantly favors Radeon cards, but the newer series 7x.xx NVIDIA ForceWare drivers seem to have played a game of catch up with overall performance. The game remains in favor of ATI technology though. Below you can see the normal framerate compared to the framerate when we enable 4xAA and 8xAF.
Half-life 2 just is a fantastic graphics experience and even a mid-range Radeon x700 will eat it raw. Of course the x850 is in lead, yet can't function as it should. It begs for a faster processor (CPU).
When you look closer you'll notice that the results are roughly seen constant for the x800/x850. This my friends means that the graphics card is awaiting geometric data from the CPU, yes even the x800 XL is CPU limited with AA and AF disabled. And that's on a Pentium 4 3.6 GHz Prescott based test rig in combination with our own recorded shader stuffed time-demo
Truly fantastic, and extremely playable. When we set AA at 4x and AF at 8x we still monitor an average of almost 60 frames per second. For those interested, you can read our full HL2 review right here.
BTW our cheapest on-line price for Half-Life 2 is
