Introduction and Test Bed Setup

Pushing FPS’s to the limit.

It’s time again for a guide to help all of you make the most out of your hardware. This time yours truly has written a guide for the most highly anticipated game of the decade. Lucky me and lucky you! This game has been out for about a couple of months and is considered by most hardware reviewers as one of the definitive gamers’ benchmarks that pushes hardware to the limit. As you can see from Brandon’s reviews of the newer X800 and 6800 architectures, this game is still making them strain at higher resolutions, especially with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enabled. But don’t leave it up to me to try to convince you what a technologically advanced game this is, make your assumptions after you see the benchmarks later in the article.

Testbed setup and explanation

The testbed has changed for this optimization guide. I have added a few more cards to the lineup and have dropped the MX440 8X and the Radeon 8500. The MX440 really has no chance of even pulling 30FPS out of this game with decent quality. I have also dropped using the P4 2.8 as my second machine due to the almost identical results posted in the Unreal Tournament 2004 article. Again, in all fairness I will not be using the fastest mobo and cards, because then optimizing would not be necessary.

The Cards!

Another shot of cards.

The Benchmarking Beast. Aint that pretty but gets the job done.

My new work area. Should upgrade soon.

System Setup

AMD Athlon 2600+ (Thoroughbred core)

FIC AU11 nForce2 Motherboard

512MB DDR333 Memory

20GB Western Digital Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional SP2

DirectX 9.0c

Half Life 2 Source Engine 7 Build 2279

Half Life 2 custom Timedemo a

Video Cards used for Testing

ATI Radeon 9800 XT
Tyan Tachyon G9500 Pro (unlocked)
Driver Catalyst Version 5.1 (non-ccc)

e-GeForce 6600GT (GeForce 6600GT)
Nvidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (GDDR3) Reference Board
ASUS V9280S Ti4200 8X
Driver Forceware Version 66.93