Half-Life 2

With only 12 TMUs the PowerColor X1900 GT is confidently ahead of the Radeon X1800 XL from 1280x1024 resolution onward. When overclocked, it is just a little slower than the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB. This means the GPU frequency is the decisive performance-related factor in this test.

Half-Life 2: Episode One

This sequel to Half-Life 2 picks up at the moment of the explosion of the Citadel’s main reactor. Episode One utilizes an improved version of the Source engine our readers should be familiar with by the tech demo Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. This engine employs an integer based HDR method (INT16) which is different from Far Cry’s HDR implementation. This method is less accurate, but it is compatible with full-screen antialiasing and works on any graphics card that supports Shader Model 2.0.

The new card is as fast as the GeForce 7900 GT in the lowest resolution, but the latter leaves it behind in the higher display modes. This allows the Nvidia card to show an acceptable average speed in 1600x1200 whereas the Radeon X1900 GT is limited to 1280x1024 resolution in which its performance is about 70fps.