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Little really needs to said about this game, the hype surrounding it has been escalating for over a year since the failed release to tie in with ATI's 9800XT series in September of 2003. Having been at the ATI Munich launch for the aforementioned card it came as a major disappointment to all the journalists there as we had all hoped to be at least seeing a playable version. All that is history and today at last Valve finally unlocked the vault to first person heaven with the much sought after follow up to the ground breaking original masterpiece. Today im not going to be reviewing Half life 2 but as we have in the past created articles to give real world indications of performance on various hardware I felt it a worthwhile endeavour to follow up with this hot new title. Over the last week I have been playing with Half life 2 and a mixture of ATI and Nvidia hardware with the newest released ATI 4.12 beta drivers and Nvidia's newest 66.93 drivers. Normally I wouldnt test with beta drivers but ATI have released these drivers to the public offically. While this article isnt massively indepth its main purpose is to basically show a user in the market for a new card how this game will perform across a wide spectrum of hardware across both AGP and PCIe platforms.
Graph 1 (below) 1600x1200 4AA and 8AF
Graph 2 (below) 1600x1200 4AA and 8AF
Graph 3 (below) 1280x1024 4AA and 8AF
Graph 4 (below) 1280x1024
Graph 5 (below) 1600x1200 4aa 8af
As you can see from the results above, ATI are really dominating performance within this game, quite the reverse of the Doom3 situation we had upon release a while ago. Gabe Newell has always stated this game would run faster on ATI hardware primarily due to the higher performance of the ATI shaders in DX9, but this is not to say the nvidia hardware gives a poor showing with even the mid range cards handling this game with relative ease at high resolutions.
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