Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 2 - Mainstream DX8/DX9 Battle

How about a walk on the beach?

Just like in the original Half Life, Half Life 2's levels are split into multiple parts and are loaded as you encounter them in order to make the game flow more like a story rather than your average first person shooter.  Our next benchmark is a continuation of the d2_coast levels: d2_coast_12. 

This particular demo takes place on a beach during the early morning.  In the demo, our player walks along the beach only to be ambushed by a few soldiers, which he mows through with ease.  Here's where things get interesting though; one of the most stressful shaders in the entire game is located in the d2_coast_12 level.  There are a couple of huts armed with machine guns placed on the beach, but to protect the operator of the gun there's a bit of protective glass much like a windshield at the front of the huts.  The glass shaders end up severely reducing frame rate, although with all of the cards we have here the game is still playable. 

Our player stares at the glass of one of these huts for a bit before moving on, finally coming across a couple of enemies in an elevated hut.  The player fires a few rockets at the hut, which produce explosions that are also fairly GPU intensive, while being shot at from above.  The demo closes with our player tossing a grenade at the enemy hut as a last resort. 

We chose this level and section of the game for two reasons: 1) The GPU intensive glass shader we mentioned earlier intrigued us and slowed down even the fastest GPUs, and 2) the level had a lot of good combat which we were lacking from some of the other demos.  Once again, you can see how this demo is also typical of Half Life 2 gameplay. 

Once again, the standings remain virtually unchanged in this demo with the 9700 and 9600XT performing very well. The Radeon X300 and GeForce 6200 also perform very closely to one another here:

In DX8 mode there's more of the same, the 5900XT does pretty well as does the age old GeForce4: