NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS Refresh: Asus and XFX
Half Life 2: Episode 2
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 Half Life 2: Episode 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. And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapon and level design, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024, 1,600 x 1,200 and 1,920 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well. We used a custom recorded timedemo file to benchmark all cards in this test. |
In single card mode, the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards from Asus and XFX both manage to edge out the GeForce 8800 GTX by a few frames per second at all resolution, which is to say they were teh best performers in this test.
The same holds true for the multi-GPU SLI tests. With two GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards linked together in SLI mode, they once again outperformed even a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX cards. This goes to show that Half Lfe 2: Episode 2's performance, at least with the settings we used, is also dependant on shader performance and fillrate.
