Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Since our last review we have switched our Half-Life testing to Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. With the latest hardware, Half-Life and many other games are becoming system limited, as the graphics card is dependent on information coming from the CPU. In order to isolate the graphics card better, we use all of the highest settings for game stress tests at various settings.

Specifically, here are the settings we used:

• Normal aspect ratio
• Model detail: High
• Texture detail: High
• Shader Detail: High
• Water Detail: Reflect all
• Shadow Detail: High
• Vertical sync: Disabled
• High Dynamic Range: Full (when available)

When running the tests without antialiasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF), the filtering mode is set to Trilinear. With AA enabled, we run at 4x and 8x Anisotropic filtering. The hardware driver is set to 'application controlled' for AA and AF, Vertical Sync is disabled and the mipmap detail option is set to 'Quality'.

For the low feature and low resolution tests, the BFG and EVGA are neck and neck, as they are both starving for information from the system. Once the features are enabled and the number of pixels to compute increases, the extra clock cycles make the EVGA pull ahead.