Half-Life 2: Episode One

The ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro is getting closer to the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB as the resolution grows. The gap shrinks from 25-26% at 1280x1024 to 18% at 1920x1200. You have a comfortable speed in every resolution, so the ATI card isn’t any worse for playing this game. Mainstream graphics cards with a 128-bit memory bus are only good for the resolution of 1280x1024 here.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.

The ATI Radeon HD 2000 series performs faster with the new Catalyst but not fast enough to deliver comfortable performance even at 1280x1024. It’s odd that the minimum speeds of the Radeon HD 2900 XT and HD 2900 Pro differ so greatly while they only differ by 25% in terms of average performance. Anyway, the Radeon HD 2900 Pro is not worse than the GeForce 8600 GTS in this test.