GECUBE X800 XL 512MB SilenCool

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 City 17 in the "Follow Freeman!" Chapter for the purposes of our comparison. As a backup to verify that the settings were playable, we used a section of "Water Hazard" to determine that the chosen settings were playable when water was being rendered to screen; 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.

Despite Half-Life 2 being reasonably heavily CPU limited, the GECUBE Radeon X800 XL 512MB did show performance increases that allowed us to increase the in-game image quality. We were able to apply 4xAA in comparison to the 2xAA we could apply to the 256MB Radeon X800 XL, while still delivering a smooth gaming experience.

Forceware 77.72 have shown more performance improvements in this title, and we feel that this is the closest that the GeForce 6800 GT has been to the 256MB Radeon X800 XL in terms of performance - a mere five frames per second slower than ATI's competing part at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF.