Valve's High Dynamic Range Explored

Test Setup

While Call of Duty and the impressive-looking Call of Duty 2 are our current WW2 games of choice, Day of Defeat is a great Half life 2 mod, and with the recent release of Day of Defeat: Source by Valve, it's looking even better. Just in case you didn't already know, Day of Defeat is a multiplayer-only mod of the original Half life game, which has been out for quite a while. As with Counter Strike, Valve updated the mod to run on the Half life 2 engine, keeping the gameplay intact, but adding new physics and graphical elements, resulting in a much higher quality game.

The gameplay of Day of Defeat is much like counterstrike; fast-paced, first-person shooter action, only set in WW2 instead of present day. There are currently only four maps available and they are generally all close-quarter and set in urban areas. With the maximum limit of 16 players on each team combined with the small maps, the action can get very intense, and because of the realism factor (as with Counterstrike), you'll find yourself dying very quickly after just a couple of hits if you aren't careful. Fortunately though, unlike Counterstrike, you won't have to wait until the end of the round to respawn, which keeps the action going.

After we managed to record a demo of the game, we ran some benchmarks to see of the achieved framerates between different cards with different HDR settings. There are basically 3 different HDR settings: all HDR effects enabled, bloom only enabled (when available), and none. We tested all three of these settings on a total of six cards: 3 ATI and 3 NVIDIA cards. For ATI's, we chose the X850 XT, the X800 XT, and the X800. The NVIDIA parts that we used were the 7800 GTX, 7800 GT, and the 6600 GT. All of the tests were run at a resolution of 1600x1200 with no AA or AF.

Now, let's take a look at the performance tests.