Half-Life 2

I have to say that despite the attractive graphics and interesting gaming experience, Half-Life 2 is not such a demanding game at all. So all the today’s testing participants, except GeForce 6200 and RADEON X300 showed very acceptable results in all resolutions.

The performance in the Canals level depends a lot on the pixel shader 2.0 performance, especially with Reflect All option enabled. These shaders do not seem to be complicated enough for the RADEON X1000 architecture to show its potential to the full extent. That is why RADEON X1300 PRO yields about 20-30% to RADEON X700 here depending on the resolution. Nevertheless, the newcomer appears a worthy competitor to GeForce 6600. By shifting to eye candy mode with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering we bring the RADEON X1300 PRO to the second position in the race after RADEON X700. In this case, the performance gap between the two ATI solutions gets limited to 8-10% due to a more efficient memory controller of the new RADEON X1300 PRO and higher memory frequency of 400 (800) MHz against 350 (700) MHz.

RADEON X1300 performed much better in the street battle scene recorded on d3_c17_02 game level: here our hero yielded only to RADEON X700 with 6 vertex processors onboard working at 400MHz frequency, which is evidently more than RADEON X1300 could do with geometry processing. In addition to that, RADEON X700 features 8 fully-fledged pixel pipelines. Unfortunately, the performance gap between these two cards increases together with the resolution: from 8% in 1024x768 up to almost 20% in 1600x1200. Also, the newcomer yielded about 8%-9% to the RADEON X700 in eye candy mode.