NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS

Day of Defeat: Source

Publisher: Valve

We used the popular remake of the World War II online multiplayer, Day of Defeat: Source, which uses Valve's implementation of high-dynamic range rendering. We did three five minute portions of real world game play on the dod_anzio map. We connected to three different public servers each with a ping of less than 30ms and 16-20 players in the game when we were recording the frame rates.

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 have written quite a bit about Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Day of Defeat: Source and how Valve have implemented HDR in to the Source Engine. You can check out the articles listed below for more information on The Lost Coast & Day of Defeat: Source.

• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast HDR overview
  
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast hands on
  
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Benchmarks & Video
  
• Day of Defeat: Source

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. We found that 25 to 30 frames per second is the required minimum, and a target of 55 frames per second (or higher) is the average frame rate in our manual run throughs on these high end video cards.

We found that the GeForce 6800 GS was very playable at 1280x1024 2xAA 8xAF with full HDR enabled. However, we had to turn the water detail down to 'Reflect World' in order to attain a smooth frame rate when running through water. The HIS X800GTO iTurbo delivered a similar gaming experience to the 6800 GS, but it was a little choppier than what we experienced on the GeForce 6800 GS.

The XFX GeForce 6800 GT and Club 3D Radeon X800XL delivered a better gaming experience than the GS and GTO iTurbo cards, and were both able to play the game at 1280x1024 2xAA 16xAF with full HDR and water detail set to 'Reflect All'. This was fine when running through water and with lots of gun fire and explosions happening on screen. The Club 3D Radeon X800XL delivered the best gaming experience in this title.