Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS iChiLL ACS6

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 used a timedemo from a five minute portion of the Exit 17 level. The demo 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.







You'll get more than acceptable frame rates right the way up to 1920x1200 2xAA 8xAF in Half-Life 2: Episode One with Inno3D's GeForce 7900 GS iChiLL and, at a stretch, you'll be able to play the game to an acceptable level with 4xAA enabled at this resolution too. Obviously, Connect3D's Radeon X1950 XT 256MB costs a bit more, but it'll give you playable frame rates right the way up to 1920x1200 with 4xAA enabled. However, it's worth remembering that while games based on the Source Engine are very popular, it's not the most stressful graphics engine out there and you're not going to be able to play new games at these high resolutions.