Custom Cooled Video Card Shootout: ASUS & MSI
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Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life was one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And courtesy of an updated game engine, gorgeous visuals, and intelligent weapon and level designs, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 - the most recent addition to the franchise - offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280 x 1024, 1680 x 1050, 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well. We used a custom recorded timedemo to benchmark all cards for these tests. |
All three cards produced phenomenal results in Half-Life 2, which isn't surprising considering it is the oldest game out of all of our benchmarks. However the Source engine is very much still relevant. The Matrix GTX285 takes the overall performance lead at 1280x1024 and 1920x1200, but the MSI R4890 Cyclone SOC takes the lead at 1680x1050. Once again, the Matrix GTX260 comes in last, partially because of its lack of any factory overclocking.
