by Rob Williams on August 22, 2005 in Graphics & Displays
If you are looking for a killer gaming card, but find the 7800GTX too expensive, then you will want to check out the recently released 7800GT. It’s been scaled down to 20 Pipes and 7 Vertex Units but it still packs a massive punch. We are taking a look at the eVGA version, which comes pre-overclocked! Time to see what this beast can do.
Half-Life is one of the most popular games of all time, and with good reason. When it was released, the gameplay was impressive and the graphics AMAZING. Even though Doom III was more of a graphics hog, HL2 was far more realistic looking. No video card review would be complete without benchmarking this game, and chances are it will stay in the benchmarking scheme of things for a while.
To benchmark the game, I created two custom demos, one in the C17 level, the other in the Canals level. They are both hardware intensive and fun to watch. Lots of water, debree and shooting to be had.
I did not expect such an improvement over the 6800GT, but I am impressed. It goes to show that HL2 will eat up any graphics power you throw it’s way, and it returns awesome results. I can certainly deal with 1280*1024, 4xAA 16xAF with 100FPS.
In the graph above, I played around with the Multi-Sampling and Super-Sampling modes. Even at 1280*1024 and 8xAA, Super Sampling allows the game to be completely playable. It will likely slow way down when the Super-Sampling really get’s to work, such as the scene on page 5 of this review.