Half Life II: Episode 2

Half Life 2: Episode 2 is the newest installment in Valve’s long running Half Life series and this is without a doubt the best looking game in the series. For this benchmark a typical 10 minute exterior gameplay sequence was prerecorded and then played back using the in-game timedemo feature. The results were recorded with FRAPS.


1280 x 1024



1600 x 1200




2048 x 1536



All of the more recent Half Life games have always benchmarked well with ATI cards and this time is no different. The CPU is obviously bottlenecking most of the cards all the way up to the highest resolution but when AA is turned on things become a little more clear-cut. We see the BGF 9800GTX is able to perform marginally better than the 8800GTS 512MB and beats out the 8800GTX in every benchmark.