Date:
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

Half Life 2 Benchmarks

Preliminary framerate benchmarks facing off NVIDIA’s and ATI’s latest AGP video cards in Half Life 2 using our own custom made timedemos compared apples to apples.

continued...

Timedemo Canals 01

Article Image

At 1024x768 you can see that even with our very robust Athlon 64 FX-53 CPU that Half Life 2 is severely CPU limited on all the video cards tested here. This of course is not a bad thing. The only video card which showed any noticeable variance was the GeForce 6600GT at 4XAA. The X800Pro is right on the heals of the GeForce 6600GT at NoAA and 2XAA which further shows the CPU limitation at this resolution.

All the results are very close and even though the GeForce 6800Ultra OC edged out the higher average FPS the performance on all the cards is greater than 100FPS on average which is extremely playable.

Article Image

At 1600x1200 we certainly see some differences as the video cards become the bottleneck in performance and not our CPU.

Here we see the BFG GeForce 6800Ultra OC coming out on top with NoAA and 2XAA turned on. At 4XAA however we see the X800XT-PE edge out the 6800Ultra slightly.

The GeForce 6600GT takes a nosedive at 4XAA/8XAF, but do keep in mind that there is only 128MB of RAM on the GeForce 6600GT, while all the other cards here have 256MB of RAM.

Interestingly the GeForce 6800GT OC has a sizeable lead over the X800Pro with NoAA and 2XAA.

Maximum Settings Comparison

Article Image

In the graph above we have plotted performance results in this timedemo using the maximum quality settings available on the X800XT-PE and the GeForce 6800Ultra OC. The ATI Radeon X800XT-PE was run at 1600x1200 6XAA/16XAF and the GeForce 6800Ultra OC was run at 1600x1200 with 8xS, 6xS And 4xS AA with 16XAF. Keep in mind the xS AA modes on the GeForce 6800Ultra OC employ a method of super-sampling + multi-sampling AA, whereas 6XAA on the X800XT-PE is purely multi-sampling.

As you can see the Radeon X800XT-PE is pulling in playable framerates at 6XAA/16XAF, but the only near playable setting on the GeForce 6800Ultra OC is 4xSAA. For some reason the results at 8xSAA were faster than at 6xSAA, and we tripple checked these results.