R680 Has Landed: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
Half Life 2: Episode 2
 |
|
 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. |
Our first in-game benchmark tells almost the same story as 3DMark06. In Half Life 2: Episode 2, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 clearly outperforms all of the single-card configurations at all resolutions, including the GeForce 8800 GTX. The dual-card Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire setup was slightly faster at the lower resolution, but the X2 surpassed the dual-card setup once the resolution was increased.
