ATI Mobility Radeon X700 Showcase

Benchmarks & Comparisons with Half-Life 2
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Half Life 2
This second round of benchmarks with Half-Life 2 were run with a custom demo that takes the player through the "Canals" map, riding through some water at high speed and ending up in an indoor environment to duke it out with some baddies.  This demo makes use of an advanced water shader with reflections, and has more lighting effects than one used on the previous page.  Because of these effects, it is much more demanding and results in lower overall frame rates.  In this round of tests, we also benchmarked Half-Life 2 at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,400 x 1,050 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

The Mobility Radeon X700's performance was also quite good in the 'Canals' map, although its frame rates were markedly lower than we saw in the previous Half-Life 2 tests.  This time around, the MR X700 maintained playable frame rates in both of the default tests, and at 1024x768 with AA and aniso enabled this were still OK. However, with the game running at 1400x1050 with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled, the frame rate dipped to a point a little too low for our liking.


Marco Chiappetta

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com

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