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Written by Phyro
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Wednesday, 17 November 2004 |
Another view on Half Life
2 has been published by HardOCP. After a very long wait, what many will call one of
the two most anticipated games of this year and last, is finally here. Half Life 2 has finally
graced our desktop. Interestingly, while Half Life 2 has been the show pony for ATI, it may also show nVidia's current generation video
cards in a very good light. It has been speculated by some that Half Life 2 would perform in
a stellar fashion on ATI VPUs,
while casting a shadow on nVidia's latest silicon.
 Half Life 2
Benchmarks
First of all lets call these tests exactly what they are. They are average frame rate numbers that show you which video card can render frames in a Half Life 2 timedemos the fastest. They do not represent real-world gameplay. That said, from what gameplay we got in on launch day, we can tell you that Half Life 2 is far from a "video card hog" and will likely be as forgiving to legacy hardware as Doom 3 was, if not more so. One thing we feel compelled to mention is that Half Life 2 is not as forgiving as Doom 3 in the resolution department. Where Doom 3 looked decent at 640x480, we found that is not the case with Half Life 2. We found it important to be running some level of anti aliasing, even gaming at 1600x1200 resolution, in order to reduce the distraction of the jaggies. Of course this always comes down to personal preference.
While we have not had time to test video cards from the last two years, we are confident in saying that Half Life 2 will find a huge install base as it is going to very kind to gamers that have not had a recent upgrade in the video card department.
< BR>As for calling one video card a "winner" over the other, it just does not seem feasible and would likely be irresponsible to do so. ATI's X800 series has not thrashed nVidia's 6800 series silicon as many expected. Half Life 2 simply plays great on video cards from both nVidia and ATI. So let's make this clear. The ATI Radeon X800 series of video cards will deliver a stellar Half Life 2 gaming experience. Also... The nVidia GeForce 6800 and 6600 series of video cards will deliver a stellar Half Life 2 gaming experience. There are simply no losers to be found if you have recently upgraded your video card. You have likely all made good gaming investments.
We are going to guess that the Radeon X700Pro will run Half Life 2 at very close to the same level of performance as the GeForce 6600GT, although that is yet to be seen as the AGP version has not been released. Also, we have found no reason to think that a PCI-Express interface video cards would run Half Life 2 any better than their AGP counterparts aside from possibly having faster clock speeds.
It looks as though anyone that has purchased any of the latest generation hardware from ATI or nVidia is likely to have an incredible gaming experience playing Half Life 2. We highly suggest you experience Half Life 2 for yourself, as Half Life 2 is without a doubt "Must Have Software."
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ASUS 9800GTX+ (DK) PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
