Just over one year ago, on September 30th, 2003, one of the greatest games of all time was to be released. As you probably know, the game I speak of is Half-Life 2, and unfortunately it was not released on time. Despite the fact that Valve missed the deadline by over a year, HL2 still breaks a lot of ground. For five years this game has been under development, and for good reason. HL2 promises to be a revolutionary new game that delivers more than any other game ever could. One of the most exciting things about HL2 is the new physics system which allows you to interact with everything in the environment. Couple that with some amazing characters, weapons, and vehicles and you're in for one hell of a good time.

Today we will be examining Half-Life 2’s performance with two different systems and several different video cards. ATI, feeling pretty good about their situation, took it upon themselves to run through the entire game and find the most graphically intensive locations suitable for graphics benchmarking. We also checked out several levels of the game and for the most part, agreed with ATI’s findings. We will be using two of ATI’s timedemos as well as one we recorded ourselves, just for good measure.

Our testing consists of running each timedemo three times at 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 with No AA/No AF 4xAA/8xAF. All in-game graphics were set to Highest. Each result shown in the graphs to follow are an average of three runs at each setting. Let’s get to the benchmarks!