Half Life 2: Episode 2

Publisher: Valve

As one part of our game of the year 2007, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 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 2 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.

Due to performance issues encountered whilst benchmarking, we have repeated many of the tests for Half Life 2 for previously tested cards.





We're still experiencing benchmark problems in Half Life 2: Episode 2 and the issue is clear to see in the results tables. All the GeForce series cards seem to be hitting a performance "glass ceiling" at around 120FPS at lower resolutions with 4xAA.

At the highest resolution the EVGA produced remarkably similar scores to that of the stock card, due to its relatively minor 18Hmz core overclock. However, even the higher overclocked GTX 280s offer just a few frames per second performance boost in Half Life 2, indicating that GPU overclocks don't directly translate into source engine performance.