MSI NX7800 GTX x 2: Retail SLI

Name: MSI NX7800 GTX x 2: Retail SLI - Page 7
Brand: MSI

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, August 22, 2005, 08:00 PM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2

Details: http://www.half-life2.com/

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 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.

As great as Half Life 2 looks on-screen, it's simply no match for today's high performing video cards. Half Life 2 is CPU bound on every card except the GeForce 6800 Ultra when running at 1280x1024. The same is true at 1600x1200 when a pair of 7800 GTX cards are running in SLI mode, but every other configuration drops of off a bit when the resolution is cranked up.

Tags: MSI, sli, GTX, retail, MS, GT, eta, 7800, 780, TAI, AI

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com