Our d1_canals_01a demo doesn't contain any water, instead it consists of a mixture of lighting scenes where the flashlight is used and urban combat. In this demo the X800 cards come out ahead once again, with the X800 XT AGP and X800 XT Platinum Edition holding a performance advantage of over 20% at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF. At those settings, the 12-pipe RADEON X800 PRO is actually capable of giving the GeForce 6800 Ultra a run for its money in our testing.

This doesn't mean that GeForce 6800 series cards are inadequate for Half-Life 2, in fact they're quite capable of delivering very good performance at 1280x1024 with the visual quality settings cranked up. But it appears that right now, the RADEON cards happen to run a little bit faster.