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 to their highest levels here.

Sapphire's Radeon HD 2400 XT really gets to strut its stuff here, grabbing a huge lead over the GeForce 8500 GT at 1024x768, to the tune of almost 30%, and also giving a pretty playable frame rate to boot.

Sadly, it can't keep up the good work once anti-aliasing is enabled, suffering a huge performance loss to drop almost 30% behind the NVIDIA board.  Once more though, attempting to play at these settings isn't a realistic option for either part.

Call of Juarez

In the DirectX 10 content gold rush following the release of capable parts from both graphics IHVs, Techland's Call of Juarez was the title of choice for ATI to show off their new architecture, which in turn caught the benchmark some flak from NVIDIA with regard to the way they chose to develop certain aspects of the renderer.  Nonetheless, this engine is going to appear in a full DirectX 10 version of the game, and thus is well worth a look from a benchmarking perspective.  It should be born in mind however that this is a GPU stress test, and thus is a hugely GPU intensive benchmark rather than an indicator of in-game performance for this title.

Our low-end boards unsurprisingly have a huge struggle with this stress test at 1024x768, with neither capable of breaking into double figures.

Things only get worse once 4x anti-aliasing is enabled, but once again the two boards switch places under these circumstances.