PowerColor X1600 XT BRAVO Edition

Half-Life 2 is undoubtedly one of the best first person shooters ever made. Not only is it an immersive experience, it’s still graphically brilliant a year and a half after it’s release. As soon as the game first launched, it quickly became a standard in GPU benchmarks, and there’s no sign of that letting up soon.

For testing in this game, I loaded up my favorite benchmarking level “canals_07”. This level starts you out beside your speedboat, and you continue along the river and travel through a building in order to blow up a few gas containers which triggers a few steel beams to bust the large door open. If you take your time, it will take about 5 minutes to complete the entire section of this level.

The runs at each resolution used max settings, including 4x AA and 8x AF.

I am immediately impressed by the results here. The 6800GT is a much beefier card that boasts 4 extra Pixel Pipelines and a 256bit bus width, and the X1600XT does a great job of keeping up to it. On both tests, the X1600XT stuck only 10FPS behind what the 6800GT could muster.

Let’s see if this performance continues with our benchmark test of Battlefield 2.