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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retrospooty - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
I have never had an issue with steam, using it since HL2 first came out. Not sure what your issues are, but you might want to look into them.RamarC - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
what a twit. hundreds of thousands of satisfied users, but he can't get it to work so it must be a piece of crap. go play your ds... even six year olds can handle those.cmdrdredd - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
You're just a moron then. Steam works fine, the game is fine, Valve did a good job.Everyone knows that the HD2900XT does pretty poorly at high resolutions with AA. Every game is like this. To be surprised means you weren't paying attention
redfirebird15 - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
Can you post screenshots comparing the AA enabled to the non-AA enabled tests? Just wondering if the increase image quality compares with the impact on performance. Thanks!Oh and could you post results for a 1900xtx? It may be older but the cost of upgrading hasn't been justified yet.
shabby - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
Wow that 2900xt just tanks when you enable aa, bummer.Spartan Niner - Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - link
Last time I checked, the 2900XT doesn't scale as nicely with AA as 8800 series cards do. Also, the resolutions tested and the cards used in this comparison are far from what mainstream gamers use... the CPU comparisons are also nice but shouldn't be the main focus. The results basically tell us more expensive CPUs give better stock performance...At the very least, a test utilizing more common resolutions 1600x1200, 1280x1024, 1024x768 for 4:3 and resolutions such as 1680x1050 and 1440x900 for the widescreen crowd combined with the usage of X1xxx-series ATI cards and 7xxx nVidia cards would be more realistic.
For reference, I use a E2140 @ 2.4GHz and an X850 XT video card and run CS/DOD Source at max everything, 4xAA. At least for my needs it seems like any video card short of a 8800 series card or a 2900 series card is not a cost-effective upgrade when mid-range cards don't offer that much of a performance boost over my X850...