Half-Life 2 - DP_Coast_01 Demo

Our last benchmark in the series is the game Half-Life 2, which uses Valve's Source Engine. Half-Life 2 is a game that offloads some of its work to the CPU, so it is a good test for the latest graphics cards as well as overall system performance. HL2 offers some serious "eye candy" for the gamer with features like HDR, which was added to Half-Life 2 and the Source Engine during an update to the Valve software. This was a great addition, but it broke our previous timedemo for benchmarking. We updated the benchmark under our new testing environment.

This is the first time that the 7800 GTX 512 or an NVIDIA card does not take top billing. This is also a game that does not like SLI. Both generations and drivers show what happens when you bring it into the world of City 7.

Still, even Half-Life 2, at high resolution, falls to the new superpower.