X-bit labs

Half-Life 2 Performance Preview: The Graphics Hardware Squeezer (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko , Anton Shilov

[ 11/18/2004 | 02:15 PM ]

d2_coast_05, Car demo, Pure Mode

The “Car demo” we recorded is a pretty simplistic sequence that involves riding a vehicle on a road throwing off the way dozens of abandoned and disabled cars. Finally, the small car comes close to a building flooded by masked armed “policemen” and Gordon Freeman starts to shoot them using his weapon with great deal of success.

Even though the demo is clearly bound to the CPU performance and thus the difference between comparable ATI RADEON and NVIDIA GeForce hardware is not that substantial, even though it does exist and it’s slightly on ATI’s side: the RADEON X800 PRO still outperforms the GeForce 6800 GT in 1600x1200 resolution.

Among the less expensive graphics cards the demo shows pretty nice scalability: the GeForce 6800 is a bit faster than other graphics cards in its price segment, primarily products like RADEON 9800-series, whereas the GeForce 6600 GT demonstrates excellent speed for $199 street price.