Half-Life 2

The first level of Half-Life 2 is all about water. In fact, the record shows a trip on a hovercraft along an old and long-abandoned system of canals. The shaders that render the water surfaces are considered among the most complicated ones. They require hard math1ematical computations, but such computations are an easy meat for the RADEON X800 cards! Then, we also enabled the Reflect All mode, increasing the load on the graphics card further. The RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and the RADEON X800 XT excellently perform the task. The GeForce 6800 GT is lagging behind them.

ATI’s advantage becomes even bigger in the eye candy mode thanks to the most efficient algorithms of using the available graphics memory bandwidth.

The second game scene of Half-Life 2 (it is a battle in the streets of City 17) relies heavily on the performance of the CPU which is calculating the physics. All relatively fast graphics cards have usually the same results here, especially on Intel Pentium 4 processors that are inferior to AMD Athlon 64 CPUs as concerns running Half-Life 2.

The same goes for the eye candy mode – the top-end graphics cards are perfect equals.