NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS: AGP, Alive and Kicking
Half Life 2
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;) 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 '04 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 1,024 x 768 and 1,280 x 1,024 without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering and with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. |
Considered by some to be one of the best PC games ever, Valve's Half-Life 2 also sports a well coded engine. None of the cards we tested had a problem handling this game at a resolution of 1024x768, even with AA and AF applied.
Well, we raised the resolution and the XFX GeForce 7800 still churned out over 100FPS on average. The only card to have a little trouble, was the GeForce 6800 Ultra, but even NVIDIA's previous flagship AGP card was able to maintain a framerate over 80FPS with AA and Aniso at 1280x1024.
