ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here
Half Life 2
 |
|
;) 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 '04 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. |
There isn't very much to talk about in regard to Half Life 2 performance. All of the cards we tested, whether running in a single-card configuration or partnered with a similar card for dual-GPU operation, performed very well at over 120 frames per second. Even though it was powered by the second fastest single-core CPU available, our test system was CPU bound when running Half Life 2 with all but the 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX, which fell just behind all of the other cards. Any mid to high-end graphics card available today is able to run this game at high resolutions with all of the eye candy turned up, so lets just call this one a virtual tie and move on.
