Half Life 2: Episode Two

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.








In Half-Life 2: Episode Two, we saw some reasonable gains over the standard GeForce GTX 260. At the settings where it matters most (at 2,560 x 1,600 8xAA where the frame rate is starting to drop), it's around 14 percent faster than the 192 stream processor version and seven percent faster than the 216 stream processor version.

Compared to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, the Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP²! Edition is faster when only 4xAA is applied, but the additional 512MB of memory makes a difference when 8xAA is enabled on the Radeon. For this reason alone, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB is able to accelerate past the pre-overclocked GeForce GTX 260+ cards from Zotac and BFG, delivering roughly eight percent more performance at 2,560 x 1,600 8xAA.