Sapphire Radeon X850 Pro 256MB PCI Express

by Jeff Bouton — Monday, June 13, 2005, 03:30 PM EDT

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Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2

It Shipped! And it's GOOD!

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of millions of 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 began chomping at the bit. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network; the theft of a portion of the game's source code; a couple of missed deadlines; and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this gem. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom- recorded timedemo that takes us along a cliff and through a few dilapidated shacks, battling the enemy throughout. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Running our Half-Life 2 timedemo at 1024x768 proved to be an easy challenge for all three cards tested, each of which topping triple-digit scores. At 1600x1200, the test became more taxing, returning to a more familiar performance pattern. The X850 Pro, running 105MHz faster core speed than the X800 Turbo, kept a 5-7 FPS lead over the X800. The X700 Pro maintained an average 25 FPS gap compared to the Sapphire X850 Pro.