Hitching:
As has already been mentioned, we experienced hitching at the same point on several of the video cards that we have tested here - all three ATI Radeon\'s and the GeForce 6600GT suffered from this hitching issue at otherwise playable detail settings. It leaves a slight black mark over the performance of these four video cards. It is hard to determine whether this is actually a video driver problem, because this happened on only one of the three NVIDIA video cards that we have used during our Half-Life 2 testing. We have also experienced hitching problems on our NVIDIA GeForce 6800Ultra when we were actually playing through the entire game, particularly in the \'Our Benefactors\' chapter, so we cannot fully conclude anything other than that the hitching that we experienced during our game play is in fact a game related problem.
The hitch that was apparent during our test sections happened just before a save game on the Water Hazard level, as shown above. It is also worth noting that this was not a highlighted case, because there were also many more instances when we played through the whole title using ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition for the first half, and then NVIDIA\'s GeForce 6800Ultra for the second half of the game. It\'s a shame, because it puts a little bit of a black spot on a very polished title - we believe the problem is related to sound caching.
Final Thoughts:
There isn\'t an awful lot to say about the bleeding edge right now, certainly with ATI\'s refresh part due to be released over the next couple of days, and NVIDIA\'s SLI solutions not far away. The bleeding edge that we have looked at here could be conceived as far from the bleeding edge of graphics technology in the next month or two when the aforementioned technologies arrive in volume for the consumer.
The high-end has proven to be a very evenly fought battle, and those of you who purchased a GeForce 6800GT back when Doom 3 was released appear to have made a very solid purchase - we have found the gaming experience that is achievable on the GeForce 6800GT was on very even footing with ATI\'s Radeon X800 Pro. Then there is the added factor that you are likely to be able to overclock a GeForce 6800GT up to the base line 400/1100MHz GeForce 6800Ultra clock speeds, which will result in you being able to deliver playable frame rates with even better image quality than is already achievable on the GeForce 6800GT.
The mainstream is a single sided affair, with the Radeon 9800 Pro slightly falling back behind the GeForce 6600GT - the former was not even close to what we conceive as 100% playable at 1024x768 with 2xAA during our rather graphic-intense sections of the title, which meant that we experienced slight texture aliasing in key sections of the title. It was possible for the Radeon 9800 Pro to deliver a similar average frame rate with 2xAA, but it was unable to maintain a respectable minimum frame rate in our \"Follow Freeman!\" manual run through. We experienced several sections of heavy lagging when more than one strider was on the screen at any one time.
We were very impressed by the way that the image quality was still very commendable on the mainstream cards that we have evaluated here, and if you have not already bought Half-Life 2, we suggest you get down to your local games shop or on to Steam\'s website, and start downloading the best game of 2004.
- Tim Smalley
As has already been mentioned, we experienced hitching at the same point on several of the video cards that we have tested here - all three ATI Radeon\'s and the GeForce 6600GT suffered from this hitching issue at otherwise playable detail settings. It leaves a slight black mark over the performance of these four video cards. It is hard to determine whether this is actually a video driver problem, because this happened on only one of the three NVIDIA video cards that we have used during our Half-Life 2 testing. We have also experienced hitching problems on our NVIDIA GeForce 6800Ultra when we were actually playing through the entire game, particularly in the \'Our Benefactors\' chapter, so we cannot fully conclude anything other than that the hitching that we experienced during our game play is in fact a game related problem.
Final Thoughts:
There isn\'t an awful lot to say about the bleeding edge right now, certainly with ATI\'s refresh part due to be released over the next couple of days, and NVIDIA\'s SLI solutions not far away. The bleeding edge that we have looked at here could be conceived as far from the bleeding edge of graphics technology in the next month or two when the aforementioned technologies arrive in volume for the consumer.
The high-end has proven to be a very evenly fought battle, and those of you who purchased a GeForce 6800GT back when Doom 3 was released appear to have made a very solid purchase - we have found the gaming experience that is achievable on the GeForce 6800GT was on very even footing with ATI\'s Radeon X800 Pro. Then there is the added factor that you are likely to be able to overclock a GeForce 6800GT up to the base line 400/1100MHz GeForce 6800Ultra clock speeds, which will result in you being able to deliver playable frame rates with even better image quality than is already achievable on the GeForce 6800GT.
The mainstream is a single sided affair, with the Radeon 9800 Pro slightly falling back behind the GeForce 6600GT - the former was not even close to what we conceive as 100% playable at 1024x768 with 2xAA during our rather graphic-intense sections of the title, which meant that we experienced slight texture aliasing in key sections of the title. It was possible for the Radeon 9800 Pro to deliver a similar average frame rate with 2xAA, but it was unable to maintain a respectable minimum frame rate in our \"Follow Freeman!\" manual run through. We experienced several sections of heavy lagging when more than one strider was on the screen at any one time.
We were very impressed by the way that the image quality was still very commendable on the mainstream cards that we have evaluated here, and if you have not already bought Half-Life 2, we suggest you get down to your local games shop or on to Steam\'s website, and start downloading the best game of 2004.
- Tim Smalley
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