ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870: RV770 Has Arrived
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 was one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And courtesy of an updated game engine, gorgeous visuals, and intelligent weapon and level designs, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 - the most recent addition to the franchise - offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 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 to benchmark all cards for these tests. |
Our custom Half Life 2 benchmark tells an interesting story. First, it appears that the NVIDIA configurations used more CPU resources, which resulted in somewhat lower scores for the two- and three-way SLI setups in the lower-resolution tests than the Radeon HD 4800 series CrossFire configurations. Overall, the Radeon HD 4850 finished just shy of the mark set by the GeForce 9800 GTX+, but the Radeon HD 4870 abd GeForce GTX 260 actually traded victories here. So far, the Radeon HD 4870 has proven to be a strong competitor to the GTX 260, even though it is expected to sell for about $100 less.
