Half-Life 2

The Canals levels in Half-Life 2 are open environments with a water surface, technically speaking. That’s why the speed of the computer there is limited by the CPU, like with Far Cry ’s Pier record. It’s only in the “eye candy” mode that you can see some difference between the participating devices. Particularly, the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX is again a couple of frames per second faster than the reference sample from NVIDIA (and that’s another confirmation that the GeForce 7800 GTX does not change its frequencies with a discrete 27MHz step).

The EVGA card is either a little slower than or equal to the reference sample of the GeForce 7800 GTX in the street fighting scene we recorded on the d3_c17_02 map. This may be due to measurement errors. Anyway, the cards easily reach the performance ceiling imposed by the central processor in all cases, except 1600x1200 with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering where only the SLI configuration of two GeForce 7800 GTX cards hits it.