ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation

Name: ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation - Page 7
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, December 20, 2005, 08:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2

Details: http://www.half-life2.com/

Half Life 2

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 in mid-2003, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network, the theft of a portion of the game's source code, and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this classic. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom-recorded timedemo in the "Canals" map, 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 without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering and with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Like FarCry, Half Life 2 was another game that ran very well on CrossFire, but the GeForce cards rocked here too. If we want to get nit-picky, the X1800 XT CrossFire rig was the top performer, followed by the 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX SLI rig, and then the Radeon X1800 XL CrossFire system. Only a few frames per second separated the top finishers in this test though, and all configurations posted frame rates will into triple-digit territory regardless of resolution or level of pixel processing. Any high-end single card is enough for some high-resolution Half-Life 2 action, let alone of pair of cards.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Fire, CrossFire, SSF, Evaluation, x1, OS, ATI Radeon, OSS, XT, Lua, 180

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