XFX GeForce GTX 260 (216) Black Edition
Crysis: Warheard and Half-Life2: Episode Two
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Crysis Warhead is the recently released standalone expansion pack to the wildly popular first person shooter, Crysis. The game engine used for Crysis Warhead, Cry Engine 2, employs some of the latest 3D rendering techniques like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects. And like the original Crysis, Warhead's complex visuals are a difficult proposition for even today's high-end graphics cards. We ran the game with all of its visual options set to High Quality to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested. We ran a custom test at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with no AA or Anisotropic Filtering enabled. |
The XFX GeForce GTX 260 performed nicely on our 3GHz test system, posting 40FPS at 1280x1024 and 37FPS at 1600x1200. The next closest competitor in this test was the ATI Radeon 4870 which trailed by roughly 10FPS in each resolution tested.
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Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life was one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And courtesy of an updated game engine, gorgeous visuals, and intelligent weapon and level designs, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 - the most recent addition to the franchise - offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 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 to benchmark all cards for these tests. |
With Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the XFX GeForce GTX 260 posted the best scores again, dropping a mere 5FPS when shifting from 1280x1024 to 1600x1200. The ATI Radeon 4870 nearly matched the XFX GeForce GTX 260's results at 1280x1024 but dropped 14FPS when raising the test resolution to 1600x1200.
