Mid-Range PCI-Express shootout

Half-Life 2

Publisher: Valve Software

Image Quality:

I’m using the full retail version of Half-Life 2 with all of the latest patches downloaded from the steam network. I 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, I 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".

Both the BFGTech GeForce 6600GT OC and the Club3D Radeon X700 Pro were capable of playable frame rates at 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF with water detail set to "Reflect World". Thanks to the increased clock speeds, HighTech’s X700 Pro IceQ Turbo delivered a solid frame rate with 2xAA enabled at the same detail and resolution settings as its competition in this evaluation.

Aside from the differences in Anti-Aliasing, there are no clear differences that can be seen between the image quality delivered by the three video cards. You will notice a white speckle in the top portion of the image on the BFGTech GeForce 6600GT OC’s screen shot - this is not artifacting, it is actually a flash from guns being fired. It alarmed me initially, as I thought that there was either a driver bug, or artifacting, but it is in fact just a bullet hitting the tree from watching the scene over and over until I was convinced that it wasn’t driver related. This also happens on the Radeon X700 Pro - it just happens that the grab time was slightly different, as noted by the difference in the flames.

Performance:

I think it is safe to say that the Radeon X700 Pro delivers a better gaming experience in Half-Life 2 than a GeForce 6600GT, with HighTech’s "Turbo" clocks allowing it to deliver the same smooth gaming experience that was experienced on both the Club3D X700 Pro and BFGTech 6600GT OC, but with 2xAA enabled in addition to running at 1280x1024 with 8xAF. As with virtually all games these days, the processor does play quite an important role in providing a good, solid gaming experience - Half-Life 2 is no different here.