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 downloaded here (.zip, 14.3MB).



There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary to report here, as the differences in performance are entirely representative of what would be expected from a 266MHz increase in clock speed. The version of the Source engine used in Half-Life 2: Episode 1, as good as it is, is still only single-threaded. However, rumor has it that the next installment of Half-Life 2, HL2:EP2, is supposed to utilize as many as four cores. This would be really really cool if true, but at this point we’re not entirely sure that it is. It does make sense, however, considering the amazing versatility of the Source engine. To think that Source-based games are still visually impressive and getting better and better with updates, after having been out for several years already, is quite a thing to behold. We also hear that Dark Messiah is one hell of a game as well, but we’ve been downloading it for the last week. We’ll let you know how that turns out, and also if we will be adding it to our benchmarking suite or swapping it out with an existing application.