ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT - R600 Has Arrived

Name: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT - R600 Has Arrived - Page 15
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, May 14, 2007, 12:01 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2: Episode 1

Details: www.half-life2.com

Half Life 2:
Episode 1

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 weapong and level design, Half Life 2 became almost as popular. Armed with the latest episodic update to HL2, Episode 1, we benchmarked the game with a long, custom-recorded timedemo that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 through 2,560 x 1,600 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently, and with color correction and HDR rendering enabled in the game engine as well.

In a single-card configuration at these standard resolutions, the new Radeon HD 2900 XT trails either flavor of GeForce 8800 GTS in our custom Half Life 2: Episode 1 benchmark. The GTS cards out up framerates between 9% and 18% higher than the Radeon HD 2900 XT. In the dual-card configurations, however, the system was CPU bound at these resolutions and all of the graphics cards performed at similar levels.

With the resolutions cranked up to 1920x1200 or 2560x1600, the performance deltas separating the GeForce 8800 GTS cards from the Radeon HD 2900 got smaller in the single cards tests, but the NVIDIA powered dual-GPU rigs once again pulled ahead.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, HD, Radeon HD, ATI Radeon, R600, arrive, XT, Ive, 290, AR

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