Testbeds and Methods

We have been hearing lots of requests from our readers to publish Half-Life 2 test results, but having a pretty small amount of time to accomplish the tests, we have decided to publish the article in two iterations. The first one includes three demos and only high-end and performance-mainstream graphics cards available to date, the second one will include five custom demos and a wide range of graphics cards released in the last couple of years. Later on, we will continue to investigate Half-Life 2 in various other aspects.

It has already become our tradition to use two testbeds to run the benchmarks on.

Testbed 1:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• ABIT KV8 Pro mainboard;
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB, CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Testbed 2:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (Socket 775, 3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• Intel Desktop Board D925CXC;
• 1GB DDR2 PC2-4300 (533MHz) SDRAM (Micron Technology, 2x512MB);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI CATALYST 4.12 beta;
• NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93.

As usual, we set the graphics quality of the game to the same level so that the RADEON and the GeForce hardware produced an image of the same quality. We also wanted to check out the influence of NVIDIA’s new driver (ForceWare 67.02) on the performance, but found that the difference between the new version and ForceWare 66.93 was no more than 1-2fps in the three scenes we used in our tests. Considering that the absolute fps rates are about 60-100fps, this difference fits into the measurement error range.

After we expanded the list of graphics cards used for testing, we got the following products that we reviewed:

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB AGP (400MHz/1100MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB AGP (350/1000MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI Express (350/1000MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 128MB AGP (325/700MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB PCI Express (500/1000MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB AGP (500/900MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 128MB PCI Express (300/500MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 256MB (475/950MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 256MB (400/850MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT 256MB (400/700MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128MB (475/900MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce PCX 5750 128MB (425/500MHz);
• ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition 256MB (520/1120MHz);
• ATI RADEON X800 XT 256MB AGP (500/1000MHz);
• ATI RADEON X800 XT 256MB PCI Express (500/1000MHz);
• ATI RADEON X800 PRO 256MB (475/900MHz);
• ATI RADEON X700 XT 256MB;
• ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256MB;
• ATI RADEON 9800 XT 256MB (412/730MHz);
• ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB (380/680MHz);
• ATI RADEON X600 XT 128MB (500/730MHz);
• ATI RADEON 9500 PRO 128MB (275/550MHz);
• ATI RADEON X300 SE 128MB (325/400MHz).