Half-Life 2: Episode One

Half-Life 2: Episode One makes good use of most of the latest features of the Source engine, such as Shader Model 2.0-based High Dynamic Range rendering and pixel shaders aplenty.  All graphical details were configured as to their highest levels here.

Not a great deal to tell between the two parts at 1024x768 (suggesting at least some CPU limitation at this resolution), but the Radeon X1650 PRO once again holds a smallish lead.

This lead increases quite drastically once all the eye candy is added to the scene, with a 14% performance delta between the two boards.

The gap between the two cards is again quite small with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at 1280x1024, and in all honesty framerate on both boards has dropped rather too low here to be particularly enjoyable from a playability point of view.

This state of affairs naturally gets worse with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering also in use.

F.E.A.R.

First-person shooter F.E.A.R. is another title that has garnered a lot of attention from both gamers and the graphics IHVs during 2006 - So, how does our board on test today fare?  For our testing here, we used the games built in benchmarking test, with all graphical details set to maximum quality and soft shadows disabled.

1024x768 gives us decent performance from both SKUs, although PowerColor's offering again claims the victory with a 7.5% advantage.

The performance hit for adding 4x AA and 8x AF is a large one on both boards here, but we see the ATI parts advantage climb to over 30% at these settings thanks to its higher core and memory clock speeds.

Three frames per second separate the two boards at 1280x960, which translates to an 8% win for the PowerColor Radeon X1650 PRO.

The Radeon X1650 PRO finally drops below the thirty frames per second mark at 1280x960 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering, while maintaining a large advantage over the GeForce 7600 GS.