NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90

Name: NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90 - Page 10
Brand: NVIDIA's

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, June 05, 2006, 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 '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 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Even though this game is still rather impressive visually, Half Life 2 simply doesn't tax any of today's high-end graphics cards. ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX, whether running in a single-card configuration or in a dual-card CrossFire setup put up the best scores here, technically speaking, but all of the rigs were CPU bound. The slight differences in performance shown in the graph above can likely be attributed to game engine optimizations and reduced CPU overhead in ATI's drivers more than anything else.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, X2, Forceware, force, 7950, id, AR

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