Half-Life 2 Performance

Half-Life 2 really doesn't need any introduction, though we have to say that we were anxiously awaiting the upcoming Half-Life 2 episodes. For our benchmark, we've run our own Coast_05 and City_17 demos and averaged the results.

The 6800 GS results aren't completely CPU limited, but you have to run at the highest resolution with anti-aliasing before the SLI mode starts to drop in frame rate. Even with the drop, though, Half-Life 2 is totally playable on even moderate graphics cards. The 7800 GTX KO, on the other hand, gains very little from running in SLI mode. We'll have to look at an updated Source engine game to see if that changes the picture.

Far Cry 1.33 Performance Day of Defeat: Source Performance
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  • JarredWalton - Monday, March 6, 2006 - link

    HDCP support is a graphics/display issue. As has been reported, HDCP is not supported on any current retail graphics cards. It's also not supported under Windows XP. We should start seeing HDCP enabled cards (meaning, with the necessary decryption chip) in the near future. The GPUs are ready, but they still need the appropriate chip soldered onto the boards.

    Personally, I'm really not happy with HDCP at all, so I'm doing my best to avoid it. 1280x720 DivX looks quite nice and runs flawlessly on current hardware. Here's an example from the olympics (18GB compressed to 4.5GB 1280x720):

    http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/multimedia/tvt...">2006 Olympics Men's Hockey Gold Match
  • AGAC - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link

    Hey, what's to love about HDCP. That said, it seems that we just will have to swallow that frog... I mean, DivX does look nice indeed. The problem is availability of mainstream content. I think it's going to be a very cold day in hell before you can walk in the regular video rental and get the latest blockbuster title in beautiful DivX 1280x720.

    DHCP will be broken, we all know that. It only harms the legal user because one will have to upgrade video cards, monitors and god knows what more will not be HDCP compliant. Thanks for the your tip and simpathy. Keep up the good work.

    AGAC
  • DigitalFreak - Monday, March 6, 2006 - link

    NT

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