HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II Turbo

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".

Half-Life 2 is becoming very CPU dependant already, despite its release date being reasonably late last year. Providing you have a reasonably fast video card from either the previous generation or a GeForce 7800 GTX (or two), you can gain a smooth gaming experience at 1600x1200 with maximum details.

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 65 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate delivered smooth and fluid game play.


As we mentioned in last week's GeForce 7800 GTX review, we found that the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which operates at the same clock speeds as the iTurbo mode on the HighTech Radeon X850 XT, delivered the best gaming experience in the title thanks to the 6xAA mode that ATI use. The subtle image quality improvements that NVIDIA have implemented in to GeForce 7800 GTX are great, but they were not quite great enough to brush ATI's 6xAA mode aside.

We found that the HighTech Radeon X850 XT operating at its default clock speeds was also able to utilise ATI's 6xAA mode, while still retaining a completely playable and smooth frame rate. The difference in frame rate was 2 frames per second minimum frame rate and 4 frames per second on average.

There is also a chance that you could make use of ATI's temporal Anti-Aliasing in this title, but Vsync will need to be enabled. It is amazing to think just how CPU limited this title is now � even a £230 video card, like the Radeon X800 XL, can run this game at 1600x1200 with some Anti-Aliasing applied.

In the case of the Radeon X800 XL, we were able to enable 2xAA without a problem.