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 Core i7s again appear at the top of the table in our Half-Life 2: Episode Two benchmark, which uses the latest version of the Source engine. There's very little difference between the various performance performance enhancements in the Core i7 here, and the 965 and 940 are about five to eight frames per second (approx. two percent) faster than the QX9770.

The cheaper Core i7 920 is much closer to the Core i7 965 than the QX9770 is to the Q6700 or Q9450 for example - 16 and ten percent (with DDR2) versus five percent for the Core i7s.