Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Although it has been almost three years since the release of Half-Life 2, Valve has made numerous enhancements to the source engine for Episode Two. Features like HDR and other special effects like motion blur have made it an even better looking game.
Like most source games, Episode Two is not a large challenge for modern graphics cards. As such, we cranked most of the details and special effects. Motion blur and full HDR were enabled, as well as 16X AF and 4x MSAA.
To test, we recorded a custom demo with lots of antlions and gravity gun action. The demo was then benchmarked using Valve’s built-in timedemo tool. The demo was run three times, and the average recorded.
The 9600GT Sonic 1GB is especially strong in Episode Two compared to the HD3850 cards. Almost twice as potent in fact. Even at 1920×1200 with cranked details and 4x MSAA, the 1GB of the Super+ is not enough to offset its lower bandwidth.
Prey
Unlike the other games in our benchmark suite, Prey is an OpenGL title based on the Doom 3 engine. Being an entirely different API than Microsoft’s ‘DirectX’ makes for some interesting contrast to the other benchmarks. Traditionally, Nvidia cards have been a bit stronger when it comes to OpenGL rendering than their ATI competitors.
Since Prey is based on the slightly dated Doom 3 engine, we maxed out everything to ensure it gives the cards more of a challenge. Highest details, all special effects and 16X AF and 4X AA were used for testing. Click any of the thumbnails below for a detailed look at the in-game settings.
To benchmark Prey, a custom demo was recorded and then benchmarked using Prey’s built in ‘timedemo’ tool. An average frames per second figure is reported for each run. I have found that Prey and other Doom 3 engine games tend to thrash the hard disk during the first timedemo run. As such, the first timedemo run is discarded, and three additional runs are conducted. The average is taken.
Again, we see the same trend in this OpenGL title. Both the 9600GT and the HD3850 reference card do very well in Prey. The Super+1GB isn’t quite as quick, but the game is still very playable at higher resolutions.
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Capcom’s Lost Planet is available in both DX9 and DX10 varieties when run under Windows Vista. We’ll be testing both versions for this review. The Lost Planet demo was actually the first playable DX10 title to hit the web.
We’ll be using the Lost Planet demo for testing and will be taking advantage of its built-in benchmark. There are two game environments that are included with the benchmark; “Snow” and “Cave”. The snow area is generally much more GPU intensive as there is a lot of blowing snow to render. We stuck with 4:3 resolutions for testing as the Lost Planet demo seems to display 16:10 resolutions in letterbox, which does not provide a fair comparison to full screen 4:3 tests.
Just about everything is maxed out for testing, with the exception of having antialiasing disabled. There appears to be a bug preventing the DX10 version of the game to start with ATI cards using antialiasing. Even without AA enabled, this game puts significant load on modern graphics cards.
In the DX9 version of the game, the 9600GT and HD3850 reference card perform almost identically.
We see a similar pattern emerge in DX10 testing.