Half-Life 2: Episode 1

When Valve dropped the first of their series of episodic sequels to Half-Life 2, critics across the internet gave it pretty rave reviews. Gotfrag EXE’s very own Jason Baker rated the game as an A- and gave the graphics an A. The Source engine, though nearly 2 years old already, is still capable of producing some amazing visuals. To test this game, we recorded a custom timedemo that spanned three “chapters” of the game. The timedemo then had to be played in three separate parts. In order to get a good representation of the frame rates we were getting, we took the total number of frames rendered in all three playbacks, and divided that by the total time it took to render those frames. The demos we used can be found here.


Here we can see that the frame rates didn't even drop below 200 on low detail. It should also be noted that Half-Life 2 still looks pretty nice on low detail. Then we turned the settings up full blast.


What is amazing about these numbers is that none of them are under 100. Long considered the golden value for FPS, 100 is a number that people are usually striving for, especially in a game like Half-Life 2: Episode 1. With these processors, we couldn’t get the frames below 100 unless we manually set the maximum FPS that way. At max detail and max resolution (1280x1024 LCD), the lowest FPS we achieved was 105.