NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 Unleashed
Half Life 2: Episode 2
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Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life was one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And courtesy of an updated game engine, gorgeous visuals, and intelligent weapon and level designs, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 - the most recent addition to the franchise - offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 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 to benchmark all cards for these tests. |
Our custom Half Life 2: Episode 2 benchmark corroborates what 3DMark Vantage told us on the previous page, for the most part. Here, the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 are clearly superior to any other single-GPU out there. The GTX 280 also outperformed the dual-GPU setups represented here, and even managed to outpace the 3-way 9800 GTX SLI and dual-9800 GX2 quad-SLI rigs at the lower resolution.
When paired up in a duet or trio of GTX 280 cards, NVIDIA's latest flagship shows good scaling with two cards, but the three-way SLI setup was CPU bound and actually performed lower than standard SLI setup due to increased CPU overhead.
