ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT - R600 Has Arrived

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 Details: www.half-life2.com

Half Life 2: Episode 1

Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time.  And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapong and level design, Half Life 2 became almost as popular.  Armed with the latest episodic update to HL2, Episode 1, we benchmarked the game with a long, custom-recorded timedemo that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 through 2,560 x 1,600 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently, and with color correction and HDR rendering enabled in the game engine as well.

In a single-card configuration at these standard resolutions, the new Radeon HD 2900 XT trails either flavor of GeForce 8800 GTS in our custom Half Life 2: Episode 1 benchmark. The GTS cards out up framerates between 9% and 18% higher than the Radeon HD 2900 XT.  In the dual-card configurations, however, the system was CPU bound at these resolutions and all of the graphics cards performed at similar levels.

With the resolutions cranked up to 1920x1200 or 2560x1600, the performance deltas separating the GeForce 8800 GTS cards from the Radeon HD 2900 got smaller in the single cards tests, but the NVIDIA powered dual-GPU rigs once again pulled ahead.