PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Publisher: Valve Software

Half-Life 2: Episode One is the first in a series of episodes that extends the Half-Life 2 story far beyond where the original left off. Valve has implemented its HDR rendering and used it to great effect in Half-Life 2: Episode One. There are also new higher-resolution textures, new facial animations and some AI improvements made in the new game too.

Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus the drivers were left set to "Application Controlled". There are three options for the method of HDR used in this title. You can either disable HDR completely, make use of "Bloom" which is just what it says and less resource hungry in comparison to "Full" which, again is just what it says. It utilises a full dynamic range with the iris effect too.

We used a timedemo from a five minute portion of the Exit 17 level. The demo involves lots of HDR, lots of explosions and both indoor and outdoor scenes. The section we have used is typical of some of the more stressful areas in the game. Thankfully though, the game runs superbly on a wide range of hardware, while still looking absolutely stunning.







PowerColor's silently cooled X1950 Pro also had another strong outing in Half-Life 2: Episode One, with very smooth and playable frame rates right the way up to 1920x1200 2xAA 8xAF. With 4xAA enabled at 1920x1200, frame rates were still great, but probably a bit on the low side for my personal preferences in this title. If you're happy playing with frame rates in the mid forties though, the PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 is good for playing this game at 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF. One thing to remember here, though, is that the Source engine isn't the most stressful game engine out there anymore (despite still looking pretty fantastic) so you're not going to hit the realms of playability in every game on a 24" widescreen monitor.

In terms of direct competition, Inno3D's GeForce 7900 GS iChiLL is slightly faster across the range of resolutions, but you're probably not going to see a great deal of difference in a real-world blind taste test. Taking that into account, the decision would then come down to image quality difference, which, frankly, favour PowerColor's Radeon X1950 Pro, courtesy of Nvidia's pretty poor filtering quality on its GeForce 7-series cards. This is especially true in many scenes in Half-Life 2 and its derivatives.