ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation

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.