ATI Radeon X1650 XT with Native CrossFire
Half Life 2: Episode 1
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;) 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. So, when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Upon its release, HL2 was universally lauded, and the sequel won an array of "Game of the Year" awards. 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 and 1,600 x 1,200 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 single card mode, the Radeon X1650 XT and GeForce 7600 GT perform right on par with each other at 1280x1024, but the new Radeon jumps out to a significant 20% lead once the resolution is cranked up to 1600x1200.
Unfortunately, CrossFire doesn't scale quite as well as SLI here. In dual-card CrossFire mode, the Radeon X1650 XT cards outpace the 7600 GT cards by about 10% at the lower resolution, but that lead dwindles to almost nothing once the resolution is raised to 1600x1200.
