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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Trixanity - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
I kinda agree with that. I would like to see some tests with more standard specs, than top-end. You should do top-end when comparing new hardware against each other (AMD vs Intel and Nvidia vs AMD), but when testing a game, you may still use these, but try also to include older hardware such as DX9 cards like X1900XTX and 7800GTX or 7900GTX (And GT).Would be more helpful to the average gamer, as not all have the money to invest in the top end each month. About the resolution, mostly you do out-of-reach resolution for most, but this time I think you did include 1024x768 for CPU testing, right? I think you should do 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (Or Wide Screen resolutions) more often. I myself run my games at 1024x768, but would probably change when I get a new monitor. (Have old CRT). Those 1900x1200 resoluations are only for people with 24" screens or more.
Cali3350 - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
Demo files arent linked correctly, cant get them to download in either firefox or IE.tmx220 - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
Why wasn't the HD 2900Pro not tested?The review boasts the 8800GTS 320MB as the best value but clearly it didn't have its price competitor (the HD 2900Pro) to go up against
Proteusza - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
This test is kinda screwed I think. They didnt test the 8800 GTS 640, but then claim ATI is the winner at that price point. Hello? You didnt test it, how do you know? They also state that the 320 mb version performs identically at lower resolutions and AA settings, which is true, but they didnt test the 640mb version so we wont know how it performs against the 2900XT at high res/AA settings. Thanks guys.tonjohn - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
Probably b/c the GTS is already competitive with the XT as it is.8steve8 - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
it's misleading (not saying intenionally... but still...)to compare cpu costs without considering chipset costs.
intel motheboards have higher costs partially due to their memory controller.
what is more applicable to us is cpu+motherboard cost comparasons
or cpu+motherboard+ram (but here we assume its all the same ddr2 so doesn't really matter)
just one example (i was recently looking at building a system with hdmi)
cheapest core 2 duo board with hdmi is $114 shipped at newegg (an ati chipset)
cheapest intel chipset board for core 2 duo with hdmi is $126 shipped at newegg
cheapest AM2 board with hdmi is $72 shipped (ati chipset)
cheapest AM2 nvidia chipset board with hdmi is $79 shipped.
so maybe this particular type of motherboard isnt a great example. but here we see an avg price difference of over $40.
for my purpose that means intel cpus have to be $40 cheaper with teh same performance...
before anyone spams me, i agree intel has better cpus right now, but comparing cost on cpu alone is not relevant to consumers, when its useless without a motherboard.
mcnabney - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
That is a very valid point to make. However, motherboards and the chipsets inboard can also impact performance, so once you start adding more variables this simple article will need a Rosseta stone to decipher.also, since most of these GPUs can be run in SLI/Crossfire, does either ATI or Nvidia scale better with a second card?
KeithP - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
It would have been far more useful with some older GPUs benchmarked.johnsonx - Sunday, October 14, 2007 - link
indeed... why spend hours testing with 5 different speeds of the same CPU, yet not even bother with any X1k series and GeForce 7 series GPU's? Do we really need tests to tell us an X2-5000 is a little faster than an X2-4800, which is a little faster than a 4600, which is a little faster than a 4400, etc.? At most we'd need tests of the fastest and slowest sample of each processor type. I guess for Intel this is mostly what was done, although even a couple of those could be dropped, but for AMD X2's only 2 or maybe 3 needed to be included. Also, how about a couple of common single cores to see how much dual-core benefits the new source engine, say an A64-3500 and a 3.2Ghz P4?Vidmar - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
No doubt. Here I was expecting to see how the game may run on nVidia 7800 or 7900 cards. A bit misleading on them to suggest that this would be a comprehensive review. Far from it with only 4 GPUs used.