Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB

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.

Results with HL2 are far tighter than any other game we test with, and it becomes the CPU that’s the bottleneck, not the GPU. Valve does a great job of making sure all of their Source-based games run well on most video cards, luckily for gamers.

Thanks to ATI’s 8.12 Catalyst drivers, which improved performance all-around, the HD 4850 X2 out-performed its bigger brother. That changes when the HD 4870 X2 is tested with the same drivers, but we were unable to deliver those results for this article due to time-constraints.