BFGTech 8800 GTX Watercooled Edition

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 did a five minute manual run through from the Exit 17 level. It 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.

24" widescreen gaming:

The shadow quality and fog bugs that we reported back in November are still prominent in Half-Life 2: Episode One, and the issues are also present in Counter-Strike: Source, too. In the release notes for the latest Forceware drivers, NVIDIA acknowledges the issue, but has filed them under "Not NVIDIA Issues". I hate to have to say this, because it mars an otherwise flawless experience that we've had with BFGTech's GeForce 8800 GTX, but there's still no sign of a patch for the Source engine to fix these issues.

With that said, the two GeForce 8800 GTX's, plus BFG's 8800 GTS all delivered the same gaming experience with 16xCSAA with transparency supersampling and 16xAF with maximum in-game quality settings applied. Unsurprisingly, the 8800 GTS lagged behind the GTX's on the frame rate front, but that's not to say that gameplay wasn't smooth at these settings.

30" widescreen gaming:

The GTX shows off its additional girth at 2560x1600, where it's capable of delivering smooth frame rates with 8xAA and transparency supersampling enabled. On the other hand, the GTS only manages acceptable frame rates with 4xAA and transparency multisampling - this is still enough to beat off the competition from ATI's Radeon X1950XTX.