Page 11

Half-Life 2
The moment the entire graphics industry was waiting for is here, after a delay or 200 one of the biggest titles in the history of PC games was released by Valve, Half-Life 2. Gameplay that should be extraordinary, sound that'll make you drool and a first time graphics experience that'll make the choice between doing the "thing" or playing this game a difficult one.

Gordon Freeman is back! Along with scientist Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, your mission is to save the planet from total alien supremacy. See, that petite incident in Black Mesa was just the beginning: now those pesky Xen invaders and a new threat called the Combine have spread across the whole Earth, causing massive amounts of death and destruction. Its up to you to set things right.

The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2s lighting seems a lot more "natural". Let me put it like this, Doom 3s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2s lighting is just "accepted" by the eye as lights reflect, and create shadows with precision, streaming through windows with an unnerving realism.

For HL2 we recorded our own timedemo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.

Woaah, the CPU differences finally kick in bigtime. Of course the AMD 64 4000+ system is way faster than the overclocked 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 but still that's big. Below In the highest resolutions and with all bells and whistles enabled things return to normal though.

Half-life 2 just is a fantastic graphics experience and it just loves ATi cards over NVIDIA cards. At 10x7 we see 78 frames per second on average for the x850 XT and XT PE and even with 4x antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic filtering (below) we observe 77 FPS, which is just shocking as we clealry see the CPU limitation kicking in. 3.4 GHz is very nice, but the graphics cards need more.

Read and weep.

Truly fantastic, and extremely playable. For those interested, you can read our own full HL2 review right here.
BTW our cheapest on-line price for Half-Life 2 is