Half-Life 2
The Canals maps are remarkable for their water which is rendered using pixel shaders. Creating realistic water in games usually takes very complex shaders and the speed of the game will greatly depend on the ability of the graphics card to quickly perform complex mathematics. The RADEON 9800 XT feels more confident here than the GeForce 6600 GT: the gap is about 15 percent.
The RADEON 9800 XT is superior in the ?eye candy?mode, too, as besides its ability to effectively handle mathematics-heavy shaders it is also greatly aided by its wider memory bus here.
The speed on the d3_c17_02 map is mostly determined by the CPU as our demo record shows a fight with many participants. Anyway, we can see the results of the cards differ in 1600x1200: the GeForce 6600 GT is less than 10 percent slower than the RADEON 9800 XT.
The gap becomes wider in the ?eye candy?mode, reaching its maximum in 1600x1200, because the NVIDIA card feels the narrowness of its 128-bit memory bus.
