Leadtek Duo PX6600GT TDH Extreme

Half-Life 2

Publisher: Valve Software

When testing Half-Life 2, we used the full retail version with the latest patches 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 is very shader intensive.

As an additional test, we used a section of the "Follow Freeman!" level located inside City 17 in order to determine that the chosen settings were playable in more intensive portions of the title. However, a frame rate was not recorded for this section of the game. 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.

Half-Life 2 seemed to be rather different, in that the gap between the GeForce 6600 GT SLI - or dual GeForce 6600 GT in this case - was larger than what we have experienced in the other titles that we've tested here. We eventually had to settle on 1280x1024 2xAA 8xAF with water detail set to 'Reflect World' - we even experienced lag when utilising 16xAF.

The Club 3D Radeon X800 XL 256MB was best-playable at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF with water detail set to 'Reflect World'. These are the same settings that we found to be best-playable with the XFX GeForce 6800 GT. There's little difference between the two cards in terms of image quality and performance with both cards having excellent performance in the two important frame rates. The 6800 GT had a higher minimum frame rate and the X800 XL had a higher average.