Half Life 2

Here we'll use Half Life 2 to test the DirectX9 rendering performance of the graphics boards in this title. We are using our own internal benchmark from a level that has a lot of shader usage in order to maximise the utilisation of the graphics board, rather than the CPU.

Half Life 2 (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 139.5 139.5 136.5 128.5 93.6
7800 GTX 256MB 131.5 131.6 124.5 113.1 78.8
6800 Ultra 256MB 131.2 120.5 87.0 73.7 46.0
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB 6.1% 6.0% 9.6% 13.6% 18.8%
6800 Ultra 256MB 6.3% 15.8% 56.9% 74.4% 103.5%

Despite there being a fair amount of shader utilisation in our Half Life 2 demo the G70 based boards are only becoming significantly graphics limited hat 1600x1200, so the performance gap between them is a little lower than in previous cases. Here, though, the GTX 512MB board is able to double the performance of the 6800 Ultra.

Half Life 2, 4x AA & 8x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 140.3 139.1 122.5 105.3 69.9
7800 GTX 256MB 132.4 130.9 106.2 87.5 57.6
6800 Ultra 256MB 127.0 100.7 65.1 52.4 34.0
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB 6.0% 6.3% 15.3% 20.3% 21.4%
6800 Ultra 256MB 10.5% 38.1% 88.2% 101.0% 105.6%

Once again, despite the utilisation of 4x FSAA, which should be a fairly bandwidth intensive operation, the performance gains of the GTX 512MB stay in the at around 21% at high resolution, well below the 42% bandwidth increase the GTX 512MB board has over the 256MB board. As with normal rendering in this test, the 512MB GTX has over twice the performance of the 6800 Ultra.

Half Life 2, 8xS TrAA & 16x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 136.8 120.0 84.1 63.5 40.3
7800 GTX 256MB 125.4 103.1 68.9 51.6 32.5
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB 9.1% 16.4% 22.1% 23.1% 24.0%

With 8xS TrAA and 16x AF enabled the performance difference between the two 7800's stand at the early to mid 20's in terms of percentage. Here we see that 512MB version maintains an average FPS above 60 at 1280x1024.