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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 |
| x700 Pro 4xAA 8xAF | 70 | 52 | 35 | 29 |
| 6800GT 256MB 4xAA 8xAF | 88 | 79 | 52 | 47 |
| x850XT Reference 4xAA 8xAF | 93 | 91 | 80 | 69 |
| 6600GT 128MB | 90 | 84 | 58 | 43 |
| x700 Pro | 80 | 77 | 57 | 46 |
| 6800GT 256MB | 89 | 88 | 80 | 70 |
| x850XT Reference | 94 | 94 | 94 | 92 |
Where Half-Life 2 was significant in favor for Radeon cards, the newer series 7x.xx NVIDIA ForceWare drivers seem to have play a game of catch up with overall performance, the game remains in favor of ATI technology though. Half-life 2 just is a fantastic graphics experience and even a mid-range Radeon x700 will eat it raw. When we have a look, of course the x850 is on lead, and by a very significant margin I must add. When you look closer you'll notice that the results are roughly seen constant for the x850. This my friends means that the graphics card is awaiting data from the CPU, yes the x850 XT PE is CPU limited here. 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.
For those interested, you can read our full HL2 review right here.
BTW our cheapest on-line price for Half-Life 2 is
