HIS X850XT IceQII Turbo and Platinum Series VIVO 256MB AGP

by Jeff Bouton — Monday, June 06, 2005, 01:00 PM EDT

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Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2

It Shipped! And it's GOOD!

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of millions of 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 began chomping at the bit. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network; the theft of a portion of the game's source code; a couple of missed deadlines; 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 gem. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom- recorded timedemo that takes us along a cliff and through a few dilapidated shacks, battling the enemy throughout. These tests were run at resolutions of 1024 x 768 and 1600 x 1200 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Once again, at 1024x768, the X850XT's were essentially tied, while the V9999 Gamer Edition took the third spot. When we increased the resolution to 1600x1200, the Platinum Edition offered the best overall performance. We saw close to a 4 FPS variation with the Turbo edition, which widened to 6 FPS with 4X AA / 8X Anisotropic Filtering enabled. The V9999 rounded out the test by lagging the Platinum Edition by no less than 24FPS with No AA and 47 FPS with 4XAA and 8X Aniso enabled.