Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B Radeon X1800XL
 |
|
;) Half Life 2 |
Half-Life 2 is a game that needs no introduction. The underlying technology behind HL2, however, may not be as well known. The Source Engine powering Half-Life 2 is responsible for the game's realistic visuals, with support for shader model 2.0 shaders, bump mapping, and Cube and environment mapping. Half-Life 2 also makes use of dynamic lights, vertex lighting and light maps, and water with refraction and fresnel effects, among a host of other rendering features. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom-recorded timedemo taken in the "Canals" map, that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 with 4XAA anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. |
Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B = GeForce 7800 GT
Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B = Radeon X1800 XL
Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B = GeForce 7800 GT
Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B = Radeon X1800 XL
Half-Life 2 , for all of its graphical beauty, runs very well on almost all current generation graphic cards, so we won't see the disparity that is prevalent in the other benchmarks. In fact, without any additional pixel processing, the three cards are separated by three frames at the most with the X1800XL "winning" one contest and the 7800GT taking the other. Once we turn up the graphic settings, though, there is a bit of a shakedown. At both resolutions, the X850XT led the way, followed by the X1800XL, and finally the 7800GT.
