NVIDIA's SLI: Part 3 - 6800 & 6600 GT

Half-Life 2

Publisher: Valve Software

We are using the full retail version of Half-Life 2 with the latest patch downloaded and installed via the steam network. We did a manual run through from a section of City 17 in the "Follow Freeman!" Chapter for the purposes of our comparison. As a backup to verify that the settings were playable, we used a section of "Water Hazard" to determine that the chosen settings were playable when water was being rendered to screen; however, a frame rate was not recorded for this section of the title – it was merely a loop back to ensure that our settings were playable in the most graphic-intense parts of the game.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus the drivers were left set to "Application Controlled".

In Half-Life 2, we found that the MSI GeForce 6800 Std SLI delivered good solid game play at 1600x1200 2xAA 8xAF with everything set to 'High' apart from water quality, which was set to 'Reflect World', while the BFGTech GeForce 6600 GT OC SLI was best-playable at 1280x1024 2xAA 8xAF with water quality set to 'Reflect World'.

The single XFX GeForce 6800 GT delivered a smooth gaming experience at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF with maximum details, meaning that water quality was set to 'Reflect All'. A single MSI GeForce 6800 Std allowed us to play through Half-Life 2 at 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF with water quality set to 'Reflect World'.

Finally, a single BFGTech 6600 GT OC was best-playable at either 1024x768 4xAA 8xAF or 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF with water quality set to 'Reflect World'. We only included results for 1024x768 4xAA 8xAF in our graph, but you can find frame rates for the GeForce 6600 GT OC at 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF in our Mid-Range PCI-Express shootout.

In this title, the tides have turned, as the single XFX GeForce 6800 GT delivered the best gaming experience out of the bunch. We feel that this is because Half-Life 2 is a CPU-limited title, rather than being video card limited like Doom 3. As we mentioned yesterday, Half-Life 2 requires a fast processor in order to see the benefits of SLI, and with a faster processor, you may well see a different picture painted, whereby the GeForce 6800 Std and GeForce 6600 GT OC SLI solutions are faster than a single XFX GeForce 6800 GT.