SiN Episodes: Emergence

To test our High-End systems, we searched the game and found one of the more intensive levels to create a worse-case scenario. The level is centered around the docks, so features a healthy amount of water reflections, as well as a mixture of large open areas and enclosed spaces. We played the level for four minutes and recorded the framerate using FRAPS. Benchmark runs were repeated several times and averaged to determine the minimum and overal average framerate across 240 seconds of gameplay.

High-End System Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (operating at 2600MHz, 13x200MHz), ABIT AN8 32X (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS4000 Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-3-3-7-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty soundcard; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 platform drivers, version 6.82.

Video Cards:

• BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 670/1640MHz using Forceware 84.25, available from nZone;
  
• Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 650/1550MHz using Catalyst 6.4 WHQL;
  
• BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 425/1050MHz using Forceware 84.25, available from nZone.
  
• Sapphire Radeon X1800XL 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 500/1000MHz using Catalyst 6.4 WHQL;

With Source now approaching 18 months old, it should come as no surprise that even leaving aside SLI and CrossFire multiple card configurations, our high-end system ran SiN Episodes at Maximum Detail at extremely high resolutions without breaking a sweat.

As we showed, Transparency Supersampling and Quality Adaptive AA makes a dramatic improvement to image quality in the game and fortunately we were were able to run it on all four cards. The target resolution was 1920x1200, in line with the latest ultra-desirable 24" LCD monitors, such as the Dell 2407WFP.

Looking at the framerates, if you run a CRT at 2048x1536 you shouldn't have a problem. We would have loved emulate Gabe Newell (who has a 30" Apple Cinema Display on his desk) and test at 2560x1600 but sadly our 30" Dell had to be returned before testing began. Judging by the speed at 1920x1200, we imagine that it would run at an acceptable framerate.

Even the slower pair of GeForce 7800 GT and Radeon X1800XL were able to handle the game at 1920x1200. If you own either of these cards and play games at either 1600x1200 on a CRT or 1280x1024 on an LCD you will have more than enough grunt to play SiN Episodes. In testing, we found 2xTSS / 2xQA AA to perfectly satisfactory, and certainly preferable to 4x vanilla AA, which does little to hide the issues with transparent textures, such as chainlink fences. Indeed, at resolutions lower than 1920x1200, it would be possible to increase to 4xTSS / 4xQA AA.