NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra

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.

Half Life 2 Episode 1 @ 2560x1600

From this point forward, we'll have two graphs and an image on every page that contains 3D performance data. The graphs are split between standard, more common 4:3 resolutions and more taxing XHD, 16:10 resolutions. The images at the top of the page are simply to illustrate just how massive a 2560x1600 screen resolution is. As you'll see throughout this article, NVIDIA's high-end SLI configuraitons (and even single cards in some tests) are capable of perfectly playalke framerates at this high resolution, with anti-aliasing and high levels of anisotropic filtering enabled.

With a single GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra installed, our custom Half Life 2: Episode 1 benchmark is effectively CPU bound until the resolution is increased to 2560x1600. And in the dual-card SLI configurations, the game is CPU boung regardless of resolution. Because of this, the Ultra and GTX put up similar scores, which are significantly higher than anything the Radeon can muster.