Half-Life 2

The demo we recorded on the d_canals_12 map is almost all water rendered with the help of pixel shaders, so graphics cards with a high pixel shader performance are on top here. They are the 16-pipelined RADEON X800 PRO and GeForce 6800 GT. The ASUS N6600 GT/TD keeps on the same level with the GeForce 6800; the latter has 12 pipelines and a 256-bit memory bus, but the ASUS card makes up for that with its high operational frequencies.

The N6600 GT/TD is slower than the RADEON 9800 XT in the “eye candy” mode, but overclocking helps to close the gap. By the way, take note that the GeForce 6600 GT AGP can give out a playable frame rate in one of the most difficult scenes of Half-Life 2, in the most popular resolution today (that is, 1280x1024) and with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

The scene recorded on the d3_c17_02 map depicts a combat in the streets of a city. This scene is CPU-dependent due to the numerous character models, but it’s clear as soon as 1280x1024 resolution that the RADEON 9800 XT is faster than the ASUS N6600 GT/TD.

The card from ASUS falls even further back behind its competitor in the “eye candy” mode. The gap is as big as 40% in 1600x1200 resolution. However strange it seems, but the GeForce 6600 GT AGP can yield about 60fps only in 1024x768 here.