Gainward Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample

Half-Life 2

Publisher: Valve Software

We are using the full retail version of Half-Life 2 with the latest patch downloaded and installed via the steam network. We did a manual run through from a section of the "Water Hazard" level for the purposes of our comparison. It is a typical scenery and surrounding found throughout large portions of the game and it is very shader intensive.

As a backup to verify that the settings were playable across the whole game, we used a section of the "Follow Freeman!" level located inside City 17 in order to determine that the chosen settings were playable in other intensive portions of the title. However, a frame rate was not recorded for this section of the title - it was merely a loop back to ensure that our settings were playable in the most graphic-intense parts of the game.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus the drivers were left set to "Application Controlled".

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 25 to 30 frames per second minimum and a target of 60 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate delivered smooth and fluid game play.

The supercharged Gainward GeForce 7800 GTX Golden Sample was capable of playing Half-Life 2 with 8xS TRMS AA - Super Sampled Anti-Aliasing enabled and for added benefit, we were also able to turn Transparency MultiSampled Anti-Aliasing on too - delivering image quality that we've not seen in Half-Life 2 from a single card.

In order to run at these settings, you will need a fast CPU, but we found that it was adequately playable with the minimum frame rate in both of our run throughs not dipping below 30 frames per second. This is simply outstanding performance - who would've thought we'd be able to play Half-Life 2 with 8xSAA enabled at 1600x1200 on a single card during 2005? I certainly didn't think it would be possible.

The reference GeForce 7800 GTX also delivered some fantastic performance, and it was possible to achieve some crazily smooth game play at 1600x1200 4xTRSS AA and 16xAF - the minimum frame rate was a massive 44 frames per second, while the average frame rate was an equally crazy 90 frames per second!

The HIS Radeon X850 XT PE was no slouch in this title either - we found that we were able to play this game at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF - that's hardly poor image quality by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is questionable whether it is better than NVIDIA's 4x TRSS AA, which really makes railings and fences look a damn sight more realistic. There's less shimmering on fences and they're a hell of a lot more realistic. Finally, the XFX GeForce 6800 GT SLI was the worst performer in the bunch, only delivering smooth game play at 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF.