Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Publisher: Valve

As one part of our game of the year 2007, Half-Life 2: Episode Two set a new high in narrative and gameplay for the series. Using Valve's widely used, albeit not overly hardware intensive, Source engine that also features as a part of legendary games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, we were keen to feature its performance here too.

The Source engine is the most scalable engine we test. While it still supports only DirectX 9.0, it features effects like dynamic lighting with HDR effects, motion blur, advanced Havok Physics and high model details.

Episode Two took Half-Life out into large open environments for the first time and we test with Gordon running through a large open level that combines forest and houses with explosions and physics.

All in game detail settings are set to their highest levels, with HDR enabled and, for anti-aliasing, MSAA was used and controlled from inside the game.


The Phenom II X3 720 again beats the Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 in a couple of the tests and closes in on the Phenom II X4 940 too. The Source engine takes advantage of extra cores, as demonstrated by the Athlon X2 7750 result, but mostly clock speed too - this leaves the Phenom II X4 810 and 805 quite low down the table.

As for DDR3 versus DDR2, there's a bit of a difference which is more pronounced in the low end, but as the frame rate increases the performance margin gets smaller.