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

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of millions 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; a couple of missed deadlines; 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 custom recorded timedemo at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

The results in Half-Life 2 originally looked just like what we had seen with Far Cry.  The Albatron PC6600U was just oh-so-close to the X700 Pro, falling three frames behind in our initial run, and then just over 9 frames with AA and AF enabled.  This time, the X700 Pro maintained it's slim lead over the PC6600U when testing at 1600x1200.  Lost in these comparisons was the fact that all three cards seem to handle the complex textures and shaders in Half Life 2 pretty well.  Pushing out nearly 60 frames per second at 1600x1200 is hard to scoff at.