Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX
Half Life 2
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;) 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 without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering and with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. |
We're not going to spend too much time dissecting the results of our custom Half Life 2 benchmark, because all of the cards we tested posted excellent frame rates, and the test system was basically CPU bound with any of the 512MB cards installed. Technically speaking, the Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX was the fastest overall, but a difference of one or two frames per second can hardly be considered a clear victory, when all of the cards are putting up 135+ frames per second.
