NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS - Page 7
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, November 07, 2005, 08:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2

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

Half Life 2

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 in mid-2003, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network, the theft of a portion of the game's source code, 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 classic. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom-recorded timedemo 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.

Our custom Half Life 2 benchmark proved to be no match for any of the cards we tested here. In this benchmark, the Radeon X1600 XT put up some decent numbers, approaching 60 FPS at 1600x1200 with 4XAA and 16X aniso, and the Radeon X800 XL came out on top in every test configuration. The GeForce 6800 GS and GT were evenly matched, with a somewhat surprising edge going to the GS. Either the new GeForce 6800 GS' pixel shader pipes have been optimized for higher efficiency, and the optimizations give it an edge in some circumstances, or the GS's higher vertex processing advantage over the GT (531M/s vs. 525M/s) gives it an edge here.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, force, 680, id

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