NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2

Name: NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI Ultra and GeForce 9800 GX2 - Page 16
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, March 18, 2008, 08:00 AM EDT

Half Life 2: Episode 2

DirectX Gaming Performance

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 1,920 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 file to benchmark all cards in this test.

So much for those 3DMark06 results, huh? In our custom Half Life 2: Episode 2 benchmark, the new GeForce 9800 GX2 significantly outperforms any other single-card solution. The dual-card GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB SLI configuration does pull ahead due to its higher GPU core and memory clock speeds, but the difference in minscule.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, nforce, 790i, sli, X2, Ultra, force, 980, ULT, id, and

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