UPDATED Half-Life 2: Episode 2 CPU and Graphics Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 12, 2007 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Introduction
At the end of 2004, barely over 6 years since the release of the original Half Life, Valve unleashed the long awaited sequel upon the world. We stayed up late that launch night benchmarking the new game, worried that it would only run well on ATI cards, we were pleasantly surprised that Valve had made a Half Life 2 that ran very well on virtually all hardware with the exception of the GeForce FX.
A year and a half later, Valve brought out Episode One, an attempt at episodic content that was supposed to guarantee quicker game releases, more frequent updates to the story and a better overall experience for gamers. Performance changed a bit with the release of Episode One and its associated version of Valve's Source engine, and the game quickly became a regular part of our CPU and GPU test suites.
Once more, around a year and a half later, Valve finally released Episode Two, the second installment in the Half Life 2 episodic series. Armed with the latest version of the Source engine, we went to town on benchmarking the new game to see where things have changed, if at all.
Our experiences with Half Life 2 and Episode One kept expectations realistic this time around; Valve has historically sacrificed overall image quality in order to maintain playability on even the slowest hardware. What you'll see here today is that every single component we tested, down to the cheapest CPU and GPU, are more than enough to run Half Life 2: Episode Two. Of course having a faster CPU will allow you to extract more performance out of faster GPUs, and faster graphics cards give you the ability to run at higher resolutions, but the minimum requirements for playability are more than reasonable for any modern day system.
For those of you interested, we are offering our demo files for download so you can compare your own systems. The demos are zipped up here: athl2ep2.zip.
At the end of 2004, barely over 6 years since the release of the original Half Life, Valve unleashed the long awaited sequel upon the world. We stayed up late that launch night benchmarking the new game, worried that it would only run well on ATI cards, we were pleasantly surprised that Valve had made a Half Life 2 that ran very well on virtually all hardware with the exception of the GeForce FX.
A year and a half later, Valve brought out Episode One, an attempt at episodic content that was supposed to guarantee quicker game releases, more frequent updates to the story and a better overall experience for gamers. Performance changed a bit with the release of Episode One and its associated version of Valve's Source engine, and the game quickly became a regular part of our CPU and GPU test suites.
Once more, around a year and a half later, Valve finally released Episode Two, the second installment in the Half Life 2 episodic series. Armed with the latest version of the Source engine, we went to town on benchmarking the new game to see where things have changed, if at all.
Our experiences with Half Life 2 and Episode One kept expectations realistic this time around; Valve has historically sacrificed overall image quality in order to maintain playability on even the slowest hardware. What you'll see here today is that every single component we tested, down to the cheapest CPU and GPU, are more than enough to run Half Life 2: Episode Two. Of course having a faster CPU will allow you to extract more performance out of faster GPUs, and faster graphics cards give you the ability to run at higher resolutions, but the minimum requirements for playability are more than reasonable for any modern day system.
For those of you interested, we are offering our demo files for download so you can compare your own systems. The demos are zipped up here: athl2ep2.zip.
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tonjohn - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
I would also like to see tests on:* 1gb vs 2gb vs 4gb of ram
* WinXP vs Vista (maybe even 32bit vs 64bit OS comparisons)
* EP1 performance vs EP2 performace & CSS (or DODS) performancs VS TF2 performance.
tonjohn - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
This article claims that the new engine only takes advantage of two cores. However, Valve's comments all suggest that the engine can take advantage of four or more cores.As for proof, this is what one of my co-workers from Valve's forums reports:
"How about this?!
http://i24.tinypic.com/rvefs6.png">http://i24.tinypic.com/rvefs6.png
I was in the level called "our mutual fiend" where you go down into the depths to find out what is going on. Multiple hunters and all kinds of activity going on. I'm going to run this same level with graphical settings all on low to eliminate GPU bottlenecks and set the core affinity for HL2 to use one, then two, then three and then four and record the fps in game."
ViRGE - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
I could be wrong here, but that doesn't indicate that HL2 is using all 4 cores. It could be bouncing processes between cores (which does happen with other applications), which makes it look like all 4 cores are in use.tonjohn - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
Here is the official official word on this topic:So AnAnd needs to adjust the article.
tonjohn - Monday, October 15, 2007 - link
The article still says that the new engine only supports two threads when that is actually wrong. Please fix this.FrankThoughts - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
I have several thoughts.First, the whole "30FPS is too slow" stuff is garbage. Maybe in multiplayer, but in single player HL2 Episode Two is perfectly good at 30-40 FPS. I say this because:
Second, I played through the WHOLE GAME at 2560x1600 4xAA with an X1900 XT GPU. (2GB of RAM, Athlon X2 4800+ CPU, Windows XP). I checked frame rates with FRAPS, and typically got anywhere from 30-45 FPS. What's odd is that I actually thought I was getting much higher rates and it was only after completing the game that I checked the real values and discovered I was hitting low to mid 20s at times.
Third, as usual CrossFire support is broken out of the box. Maybe the 7.10 drivers that just got released have fixed this, but those weren't available the day EP2 released and so I played and beat the game with a single GPU running. (CrossFire ran, but there was several graphical corruption and major slowdowns. Same goes for Portal. Not sure about TF2 yet....)
Fourth, CPU cores and performance scaling. Well, I may be doing something wrong (I've tried setting affinity in task manager as well as using "threads [x]" to set CPU core use to one or two cores. Other than minor variations of around .4 FPS (using a timedemo I created, since the AT demos apparently aren't available for download), I get the same result with one or two CPU cores. So, while the engine might be threaded to the point where it can "use" four or even eight cores, the reality is that it doesn't impact performance at all that I can see. Perhaps I'm GPU limited, but I was testing at 1280x800 and averaged 125 FPS (plus or minus 0.3 FPS) at every CPU threading level I tried. CPU usage still got up to around 60% max regardless, so I'm thinking either sound drivers or the graphics drivers are utilizing the other core. Bottom line is that best case (and not even likely) the multithreading is giving about a 5-10% performance boost. Usually threading has an overhead of 5-10%, so most likely CPU utilization went up but performance remained virtually unchanged.
If you have X1900 series hardware, this game runs perfectly well, turning in great performance even at insane 2560x1600 4xAA resolutions. (If I turn off AA, I get about 40% faster frame rates.) What's funny is that my performance seems to be within spitting distance of the 8800 GTS and HD 2900 XT, all on 22 month old old hardware. I've been thinking I "need" to upgrade for a long time, but every time I actually play some new title I end up with perfectly reasonable performance. My next upgrade will be quad core and either SLI or CrossFire (probably SLI since CrossFire has left me irritated on more than one occasion - basically every new game fails to run with CrossFire for anywhere from 1 to 4 months), but I'm not going to take the plunge until I actually feel the performance gain will be worthwhile. At the current rate, I might be sticking with DX9, XP, and X1900 until late 2008!
tonjohn - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
If you noticed how, prior to the alt-tabbing, the Core0 has high usage and then the other cores are all being used but the % varies with each core. This is a good indicator that the engine is actively taking advantage of each core and not simply the OS bouncing the supposed two threads around.More supporting evidence that the information in Anand's article is potentially incorrect:
From CSNation, http://www.csnation.net/articles.php/article_234/">http://www.csnation.net/articles.php/article_234/
steamsucks - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
Steam sucks. You can't even dl the piece of crap game because of server issues. Don't buy this game, and don't support Valve/Steam.Zak - Sunday, November 11, 2007 - link
I never had any issues with Steam since HL2 release. I actually like the idea of not having to deal with copy-protected CDs and "please insert CD number 5" every time I want to play a game and having my games always updated. I buy a game in the evening and next day it's INSTALLED and ready on my hard drive. I can make fully re-installable backups of any Steam content on a hard drive so I don't have re-download the whole games when I need to reinstall. I only wish they discounted the Steam games more than the actual physical products. Other than that Steam is a great idea IMHO.Z.
sc3252 - Monday, October 15, 2007 - link
Steam does suck. I wish I didnt have to use steam to play orange box, but thats how things work. I dislike it but acknwolege its not as bad as bioshocks drm.The first thing I did when I bought this game was put it on a seperate account, so that my brother can play counter strike while I play team fortress 2.
As far as performance goes, I am gaming on a 3000+ amd 64 with a 7600gt. Everything plays perfectly at 1680x1050. I have aa turned off but everything else is turned up. I cant say the same for the ut3, or any other modern game that has graphics even close to half-life 2's level.