Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Publisher: Valve

As one part of our game of the year 2007, Half-Life 2: Episode Two set a new high in narrative and gameplay for the series. Using Valve's widely used, albeit not overly hardware intensive, Source engine that also features as a part of legendary games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, we were keen to feature its performance here too.

The Source engine is the most scalable engine we test. While it still supports only DirectX 9.0, it features effects like dynamic lighting with HDR effects, motion blur, advanced Havok Physics and high model details.

Episode Two took Half-Life out into large open environments for the first time and we test with Gordon running through a large open level that combines forest and houses with explosions and physics.

All in game detail settings are set to their highest levels, with HDR enabled and, for anti-aliasing, MSAA was used and controlled from inside the game.


Again the overclocked E8400 and Q6600 provide the best value CPUs here on both DDR2 and DDR3 platforms, at a great 40 and 30 percent respectively, with the stock E8500 not far behind either. The Phenom X4 9850 OC is also upwards of 11 percent in the positive value stakes but the Core i7 920 at 4GHz can only manage a meagre 9 percent better value than the baseline.

The rest of the Core i7 CPUs provide "bad value" in terms of what the CPUs cost and what extra performance is attained from them though, although there's no worse than the Q9650 and QX9770.


Again the overclocked Core 2's with DDR2 provide the best value, although the E8500 at stock and Phenom X4 9850 overclocked also provide excellent value. All the inexpensive AMD platforms still provide a positive price : performance value and it takes the Core i7 920 to clock to 4GHz to intermingle with them. The expensive Core i7 platforms send them down the tables, and the DDR3 Core 2's join them. Even the overclocked E8400 and Q6600 with DDR3 are only just as good value as the baseline Phenom X4 9750.