The good news is that this continues with SiN Episodes, which is even missing the recent HDR eye candy Valve added to Source - the only potential snag for gamers with older hardware. We were aiming to run the game at the native 1280x1024 resolution of our ViewSonic 19" LCD and as you can see, we succeeded.

The bad news is that GeForce 6-series cards don't support Transparency AA, so the image quality wasn't the same as for our high-end system. However, we were still able to apply 4x of vanilla AA on the GeForce 6800 GT OC and the Radeon X850XT, and 2xAA on the slower 6600 GT OC and X1600XT cards.

We began testing at Maximum Detail but it was painfully obvious that this was not an option at 1280x1024. We were forced to drop to Medium Textures and Medium Models to achieve the framerates you see here. For anyone who really wants to run at high detail, we would suggest a drop to 1024x768 and lower levels of AA. CRT gamers can get away with this quite happily but anyone with an LCD will need to check how well their panel scales away from native resolution.

At the end of the day, the best yardstick is Half-Life 2 itself - if you know you can run that at an acceptable speed, you won't have any problems playing SiN Episodes. This included our 1.6GHz Centrino notebook with ATI Mobility FireGL T2 graphics - equivalent to a 9700 Pro 128MB. It's not as pretty as our desktop systems but it still ran just fine. In this context SiN Episodes would prove a great alternative to yawnsome inflight movies.