Half Life 2 has a DX9 based game engine with impressive pixel shader effects.  Our custom time demos with this game are up next.

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2 It Shipped!  And it's GOOD!

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of thousands of gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time.  So when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion in mid 2003, gamers the world over began chomping at the bit.  Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network, the theft of a portion of the game's source code, and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this gem.  We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom- recorded timedemo that takes us along a cliff and through a few dilapidated shacks, battling the enemy throughout.  These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Interestingly enough, the HIS Radeon X850 XT and X800 XL are right on top of each other at the 1024X768 resolution but a solid 6-7 frames per second ahead of the fastest GeForce 6800 card.  Let's see what turning up to high res does to the situation.

The HIS cards dominate this test pretty well and even a GeForce 6800 Ultra can't pull ahead of the mid range HIS X800 XL card.  The HIS X850 XT barely budged at 1600X1200 versus the scores it put up at lower resolution.  Regardless, once again this is a gaming benchmark and game engine that simply doesn't stress these high end graphics cards all that much.  OK, so we'll really roll up our sleeves now and bring out the big guns.