NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Publisher: Valve Software

Half-Life 2: Episode One is the first in a series of episodes that extends the Half-Life 2 story far beyond where the original left off. Valve has implemented its HDR rendering and used it to great effect in Half-Life 2: Episode One. There are also new higher-resolution textures, new facial animations and some AI improvements made in the new game too.

Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus the drivers were left set to "Application Controlled". There are three options for the method of HDR used in this title. You can either disable HDR completely, make use of "Bloom" which is just what it says and less resource hungry in comparison to "Full" which, again is just what it says. It utilises a full dynamic range with the iris effect too.

We used a timedemo from a five minute portion of the Exit 17 level. The demo involves lots of HDR, lots of explosions and both indoor and outdoor scenes. The section we have used is typical of some of the more stressful areas in the game. Thankfully though, the game runs superbly on a wide range of hardware, while still looking absolutely stunning.



There was a slight performance deficit between the 640MB and 320MB versions of the GeForce 8800 GTS cards at 1600x1200 with only 2xAA was minimal, as two BFGTech cards performed very similarly while EVGA's Superclocked 8800 GTS 320MB outperformed the two BFG cards. When we increased anti-aliasing to 4x at the same resolution, the 640MB BFGTech 8800 GTS crept ahead of EVGA's card.


The GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB's performance remains strong at 1920x1200 2xAA 8xAF, but the drop off when 4xAA is enabled is larger this time around. Having said that, the performance drop doesn't result in unplayable frame rates. All three GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB cards are faster than ATI's two high-end offerings, too.


Increasing the resolution to 2560x1600 changes the landscape quite a bit though, as both the Radeon X1950 XTX and Radeon X1950 XT 256MB start to claw back some lost ground at the lower resolutions. However, you'd be crazy to want to use either of the two Radeons or a 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS at this resolution - even with 2xAA enabled - as the gameplay isn't going to be super smooth.