Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3870 Showcase
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
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Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapon and level design, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well. We used a custom recorded timedemo file to benchmark all cards in this test. |
Half-Life 2 testing has both Diamond cards out in front of Sapphire's HD 3870 Atomic - although the delta was slight at best. The Viper HD 3870 1GB led by three frames at 1280x1024 with the Viper HD 3870 512MB in a dead heat with Sapphire's card. At 1600x1200, there's virtually no difference at all with less than a single frame separating the three cards. Of course, these three really aren't giving NVIDIA's cards much competition using this DX9-based game engine, with the 8800 GT and GTS outpacing the HD 3870s by anywhere from 10 frames per second at 1600x1200 to nearly 30fps at lower resolutions.
