Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition

The original Half-Life 2 might have first seen the light of day close to four years ago, but it’s still arguably one of the greatest-looking games ever seen on the PC. Follow-up versions, including Episode One and Episode Two, do well to put the Source Engine upgrades to full use. While playing, it’s hard to believe that the game is based on a four+ year old engine, but it still looks great and runs well on almost any GPU purchased over the past few years.

Like Call of Duty 4, Half-Life 2: Episode Two runs well on modest hardware, but a recent mid-range graphics card is recommended if you wish to play at higher than 1680×1050 or would like to top out the available options, including anti-aliasing and very high texture settings.

This game benefits from both the CPU and GPU, and the skies the limit. In order to fully top out the available settings and run the highest resolution possible, you need a very fast GPU or GPUs along with a fast processor. Though the in-game options go much higher, we run our tests with 4xAA and 8xAF to allow the game to remain playable on the smaller mid-range cards.

The card continues to perform well, and the pre-overclock helped deliver an extra 4 FPS at our top resolution. Nothing major, but it’s an increase nonetheless.

Our general rule is that for this particular game to be completely enjoyable, an average of at least 60 FPS is required. When we increased the anti-aliasing to 8xAA, we managed to keep performance above that mark, making it our best playable setting. For an affordable GPU like this one, it’s great to see performance like this at such high detail settings.