Half Life 2: Episode 2 Quick Performance Preview
Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal have just been released to anxiously waiting gamers everywhere. It has been an excruciating wait considering Episode 1 was released on June 1st of 2006, over one year ago. While Episode 2 may not push the boundaries of graphics by offering DirectX 10 graphical effects, it none the less offers spectacular DirectX 9 graphics with a few tricks up its sleeves, including the ability to offload particle effects to the GPU and of course massively fun gameplay.
We are working on a full performance and image quality apples-to-apples article comparing the Radeon 2900 XT and GeForce 8 series video cards. Until that is ready we’d like to share with you our first performance experiences with the game with a quick apples-to-apples performance comparison. The graphs below consist of a run-through of the entire first level of Half Life 2: Episode 2 in an apples-to-apples format. We have chosen to run at 1600x1200 4XAA/16XAF maximum in-game settings on all video cards under Windows Vista x64 Ultimate using Catalyst 7.10 for the 2900 XT and ForceWare 163.75 for the GeForce 8 series video cards with a C2D X6800/680i platform.
As you can see from the graph the 320 MB and 640 MB 8800GTS are technically faster than the 2900 XT in an apples-to-apples comparison so far in HL2: EP2, but not by a wide margin. The 8800 GTX and Ultra completely obliterate the GTS and 2900 XT in performance in this game. Having only played the first level so far, these high performance results inspires confidence in the playability of this game with mainstream-performance video cards in the $250-300 range.
Here are a few screenshots to whet your appetite.
Enjoy, we are off to spend the rest of the now early morning, playing Episode 2.
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Half Life 2: Episode 2 Quick Performance Preview 
Linear Mode
