ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 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. |
Once again, the new Radeon X1950 Pro's performance in a single card configuration falls somewhere in between the GeForce 7900 GS and 7950 GT, and right about on-par with the GeForce 7900 GT. The 256MB Radeon X1900 XT was significantly faster at both resolutions, however.
In a dual card CrossFire configuration, the X1950 Pros performed very well at the lower resolution, actually besting the 7900 GTX and 7950 GT SLI configurations, but once the resolution was jacked up to 1600x1200, the NVIDIA powered offerings came charging back and outperformed the X1950 Pros by about 15% to 22%.
