Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife

Half-Life 2

There’s little that can be said about Half-Life 2 that hasn’t already been said, other than that perhaps Valve put the game’s graphics to a point where the gritty, depressing world of Half-Life was a little too well done. It’s not a tropical paradise, and it’s not one large monster closet, but Half-Life 2 is unique among first-person shooters for what it does with putting players in the middle of a crumbling city. It is for this reason that the game offers a good take on another aspect of performance.

With the excitement over this title both before and after it launched, the performance graphs aren’t really surprising here. ATI needed to optimize for this title as they could, and while it’s a bit unusual compared to all of the other shooters tested today to see a gradual performance increase versus one large increase, it’s still a moderate performance increase overall. Of course, since the Source engine was being used in Counter-Strike: Source a few months before Half-Life 2 was released, ATI had the chance to get a jump on optimizing for the engine before the game’s release (and hence, our use of the oldest drivers), so we can’t fully quantify all of the optimizations that ATI made in their drivers for this game.

Here again, we also see some more aggressive performance improvements in the case of AA/AF than without.

Catalyst 4.05 versus 6.01 (mouse over to see 4.05)

If it wasn’t for the fog and water around in the background, we’d have never been able to tell these screenshots apart. There is clearly no change in image quality in spite of the performance improvement seen, which is exactly what we want to find (or rather, not find).