XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black 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 tradition continues here with the GTX 260/216 performing almost identically to the GTX 280 at higher resolutions. For some reason, the GTX 280 performs a little bit better at 1680×1050, but like our previous results, it’s a minor difference.

XFX’s nice overclock on this card helped push it up and over the GTX 280 by half a frame-per-second, totaling over 60 FPS for an absolute top resolution and ultra-high-end settings.