Half-Life 2: Episode 1

Moving away from synthetic benchmarks brings us into real-world gaming tests. In our minds, there are few games on the market that offer the graphical prowess of those based on the Source Engine offer. Being Valve’s current flagship for Source-based games, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 is a shoe-in for a spot on in our benchmarking suite. Our HL2:EP1 timedemo is merely a recording of gameplay on the very last level of the game, where Dr. Freeman and Alyx find themselves in a train depot being hassled by a strider. This final section of the game really offers the best blend of all of the different effects that appear throughout the story, which makes it an obvious choice for our timedemo.


Here we can see that although the showing from the HD 2900XT parts is far from weak, it does not stack up very well against the competition from NVIDIA. While a single G80-based part pulls in more than 100 frames at 1920x1200 resolution, the most any R600-based card can yield is 86. This is a 15 frame difference that doesn’t really have an effect on game play, but is clearly larger than what we had hoped for from Radeon HD 2900’s that offer promotions for Valve Software in their retail packaging. It is also interesting to note here that the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 1GB board musters a significantly higher frame rate than that of its R600 brethren in both the single and dual-card flavors at high resolutions. This is probably a testament to the extra 512MB of graphics memory that the card touts.

Company of Heroes

In the writer’s own opinion, company of heroes is not one of those games that automatically strikes you as being graphically intensive. After playing the game for a little while, however, and zooming in and out to micro manage large battles or assaults, it is pretty clear that you need a good amount of graphics horsepower to make the game look as good as it is supposed to. The built-in benchmarking functionality of CoH also makes it a convenient choice for any benchmarking suite. We always update the game to its latest version, as the developers are continuously adding optimizations and with each major revision we usually see some kind of enhanced graphics setting. The game is one of the first widely-played games to support DirectX 10 on some level, and indeed it has been included in our DirectX 10 section that will be presented a little later.


Here we have a pretty bad showing for the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT. Not only is the latest implementation of R600 only marginally faster than its predecessors, two of the cards in CrossFire only barely outperform a single 8800GTX.