Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview

The Test

Valve had very strict requirements about the test systems they let us use. The systems were only allowed to use publicly available drivers and thus, we used NVIDIA's Detonator 45.23s and ATI's Catalyst 3.7s, both publicly available from the respective websites.

The Dell PCs that we used were configured with Pentium 4 3.0C processors on 875P based motherboards with 1GB of memory. We were running Windows XP without any special modifications to the OS or other changes to the system.

We ran a total of three levels on each card - e3_techdemo_5, e3_bugbait and e3_c17_02, all of which were part of the E3 demos that were shown and are representative of actual game play under Half-Life 2.

We ran all cards at 1024x768, and the highest end cards at 1280x1024. We also used the best possible shader setting for the hardware, meaning that the R3x0 hardware used the DX9 code path, the 5900 Ultra used the NV3x code path and everything else used the DX8.x code path.

All tests were run without Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering enabled. Anti-Aliasing was not properly supported in this demo and thus wouldn't be representative of final game play.

We only tested with a 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro as a 256MB card wasn't available at the time (all of our 256MB cards were tied up in Athlon 64 testing). The performance difference between 128MB and 256MB is negligable; although time permitting, we may see some higher detail textures offered for 256MB card owners. We'll see what happens once the game ships though.