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: Source, 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 outside 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 where both settings were set from inside the game.





Yep, some of these numbers are rather silly... playing Episode Two at 2,560 x 1,600 8xAA 16xAF with no sign of dropping below a 100 frames per second average frame rate? You can do that with a single Radeon HD 4870 X2 - and in that scenario it's almost twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 280. I think it's time we moved on.