Half-Life 2

Publisher: Valve Software

Image Quality:

We are using the full retail version of Half-Life 2 with the latest patch downloaded and installed via the steam network. We did a manual run through from a section of City 17 in the “Follow Freeman!?Chapter for the purposes of our comparison. As a backup to verify that the settings were playable, we used a section of “Water Hazard?to determine that the chosen settings were playable when water was being rendered to screen; however, a frame rate was not recorded for this section of the title ?it was merely a loop back to ensure that our settings were playable in the most graphic-intense parts of the game.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus the drivers were left set to “Application Controlled?

All four video cards that we have tested here ?the three Radeon X800 XL's and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT ?all delivered a smooth gaming experience at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF with maximum in-game detail settings; this included using the ‘Reflect All' water detail setting. Since our Half-Life 2 evaluation, both ATI and NVIDIA's driver teams have been working hard on improving the performance in the most popular title of 2004 ?the title doesn't show any signs of sales dropping at the moment, and we feel that the title will remain an important title for both video card companies for a good while yet.

ATI Radeon X800 XL

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

Aside from the differences in Anti-Aliasing, there are no clear differences that can be seen between the image quality delivered by the either ATI or NVIDIA's drivers.

Performance:

The two different video card architectures handle this title quite differently, with the three Radeon X800 XL's delivering an average frame rate that was over 20% faster than NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT. However, the interesting thing is that it could be argued that NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT delivered a smoother gaming experience, thanks to a minimum frame rate of 30 frames per second ?this meant that the GeForce 6800 GT delivered a silky smooth gaming experience that can not be grumbled at.

The three Radeon X800 XL's all delivered a minimum frame rate of under 25 frames per second in our manual run throughs ?the best case of the three managed a minimum frame rate of 25 frames per second. While this was still smooth, the minimum frame rate meant that there was a brief stutter where the frame rate dropped below 30 frames per second. When we tested the Radeon X800 XL's on our second 'loop back' area, we found that it delivered a higher minimum frame rate than the GeForce 6800 GT; however, we feel that both video card architectures delivered a more than acceptable gaming experience in this title, and recording minimum frame rates in this title proved to be an important measurement of real-world performance as is always the case in our video card evaluations.