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Gameguru Mania News - Sep,22 2005 -

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Benchmarks - tech
(hx) 10:43 AM CEST - Sep,22 2005 - Post a comment / read (7)

The chaps over at Bit-Tech have posted the first benchmarks of Half Life 2: Lost Coast. They have tested on various high end pieces of kit, and they've also worked out the performance hit you take for enabling HDR. They also have comparison screens between Nvidia and ATI cards, and they also have an awesome preview video of the level that they have cut together:

Here is a quick overview of what we found:

Low-end: Less than Radeon 9600, GeForceFX 5900 - not playable, less than 5FPS
Mid-range: Around Radeon 9800, Radeon X700, GeForce 5950, GeForce 6600 - playable at 800x600 with AA turned off
High-end: Radeon X800, GeForce 6800 - playable at 1024x768 or 1280x1024, with AA and AF depending on the exact model of card
Bleeding-edge: GeForce 7800 - playable at 1600x1200 with full AF

Tough requirements? Sure. Worth it? Definitely. Quick note: there is no SLI support at the moment for Lost Coast, partly because we couldn't get the driver to recognise our batch script as the HL2.exe application. Expect this to be fixed soon. As for CrossFire, we'll tell you on Monday when we publish that article.

last 10 comments:

xxxx

(02:55 PM CEST - Sep,22 2005 )

Hahahahahahahahhaa ya nice results.. so everyone is gonna lag unless they own a $600+ video card..what a joke. I'll pass. Based on these results I'm looking at roughly 35fps with a recent card. Obviously Lost Coast is a hack job by Valve and like it's been since I don't play specifically CS I am up the creek in terms of optimizations.. So many people just don't care about this Lost Coast. I truly believe Valve has just lost anything they used to have in terms of merit. Sure HL2 is a good game but they can't even come close to providing a level of support that is fair to everyone. Great to release stuff but if you can't support it, you have no business releasing it.

Nosferatu	(07:58 PM CEST - Sep,22 2005 )
I've got a R9800XT, guess I'll try 1024*768 and be fine. xxxx, the performance hit isn't about Valve having crippled hands, it's about twice as many polygons in the scene in comparison with the original, high-res textures, lots of refractions and reflections, intensive use of shaders and finally the consuming HDR effect and probably something more which I didn't mention.

xxxx

(09:01 PM CEST - Sep,22 2005 )

9800XT and u expect to get good fps? Ha.. Sure with everything off, maybe.

Maybe you should take another look at the fps counts with the current settings at 1024x768...Right, well turn off AA and AF then.. cuz you are gonna lag based on those benchmarks. http://www.thetechlounge.com/review.php?directory=xfx_geforce_6800_gt_256&page=7

Lousy review but the differences in fps is probably about right.

my card is faster than yours and on average with 2x aa and 8x af i get approx 50fps on average. I get peaks beyond 100fps sure, but overall it's 50-60fps. There is no way ur card can do the same.

As for Valve, 3/4 of the stuff they put out now is incomplete or lacking in support. The ONLY title Valve gives a $hit about is CS. Sure lots are playing it but that doesn't mean you provide no support for the other parts of HL2. Their software/verification process is a joke and the reality is we are the beta testers. And if Valve ever got a date right, it would be a miracle.

3.2ghz, 800fsb and 2gb ram as well as X800 XL. I don't lag much in anything except HL2. But based on those stats I will lag with the Lost Coast.

KingArthur

(10:10 AM CEST - Sep,23 2005 )

I ordered the following:

Mother Board: Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe nVidia nForce4-SLI-IE

CPU: Intel P4-3.0ghz Dual-Core Pentium D

RAM: Infineon 1024M DDR2-533 PC2-4200 (2 sticks = 2 GB)

Video Cards: Leadtek Gefore 6800 256M DVi-i TV-o SLI 256bit PCI-Express (2 of them)

Sound Card: Creative Labs Audigy2 ZS 7.1

I don't know much about computers, sure I can build them but I don't know much about programming and stuff, but could any one guess what kind of FPS I might get with this rig half life 2 and the lost coast and about what I could set it to? I know it said the lost coast isn't SLI ready but it will be some time I assume.

oh and what is laggy for FPS? below 50? what FPS should I aim for when changing graphics?

xxxx

(02:56 PM CEST - Sep,23 2005 )

well why ur going intel is a little beyond me, u'd gain 10% on your fps just going with amd 64.. unless you already have the cpu. As for the graphics card, i'm thinking maybe if ur lucky you will be same as me, hovering around 50fps in general (no not that laggy) but you will have the huge drops down to 19fps or 20fps. You can't base anything on HL2 because u can be guaranteed there is crap code lots of bugs. ur not going to be much faster than my x800XL.

Nosferatu

(03:14 PM CEST - Sep,23 2005 )

1. I don't need AA at all, I've got bad eyesight, so I have natural AA for free :) I set AF to 4 if I get laggy, otherwise 8. If the lowest fps I get is about 15 (maybe even lower), but the average fps is about 50 I can live with that. As you might see I don't expect good fps, I expect an amount of fps with which I can at least play somehow.This is what I meant by ok :)

And then I never had any lags when playing HL2, so I guess I'll even enjoy HDR. And I think HL2 is one of the fastest and best optimized games. I don't know what doesn't make you think so.

KingArthur	(03:04 AM CEST - Sep,24 2005 )
I never liked AMD I trust Intel much much more, plus I wanted a duel core so I went with a Intel 3.0 GHz dual core. I also wanted to try having two video cards in the same system, so I went with SLI, I am hoping both video cards will share the load of half life 2 so I can play with at least decent graphics and AA.

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