Half Life 2: Episode 2

Publisher: Valve

As one part of our game of the year 2007, Half-Life 2: Episode Two set a new high in narrative and gameplay for the series. Using Valve's widely used, albeit not overly hardware intensive, Source engine that also features as a part of legendary games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, we were keen to feature its performance here too.

The Source engine is the most scalable engine we test. While it still supports only DirectX 9.0, it features effects like dynamic lighting with HDR effects, motion blur, advanced Havok Physics and high model details.

Episode Two took Half-Life outside into large open environments for the first time and we test with Gordon running through a large open level that combines forest and houses, with explosions and physics.

All in game detail settings are set to their highest levels, with HDR enabled, and for anti-aliasing MSAA was used where both settings were set from inside the game.








Despite the new driver updates from both Nvidia and ATI, our Half-Life 2 performance charts were remarkably unchanged, with the usual suspects of the 4870 X2 and GTX 280 topping the table and the HD 4870 continuing to duke it out with the GTX 260 just below. Once again, the Powercolor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ was marginally ahead of the stock clocked 4850 in every test, but only by a few frames per second, with a performance advantage of roughly four and a half percent.