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Half-Life 2: Video Stress Test

The Half-Life 2 video stress test is a shader intensive benchmark that I would suggest is more adept in painting the theorectical performance of a card rather than make any definitive statement how a card directly performs in HL2. The geometry is very simple compared to what is seen inside Half-Life 2. Graphical options were maxed out and we vary the Texture Filtering and Antialiasing.

With texture filtering set to trilinear, the 6600GT is singificantly faster than the X700Pro. A X700XT may be able to catch the 6600GT at 1024 but the gap is fairly large at 1280 and 1600. The X600 XT does pretty well at 1024 for a midrange card from last generation but the performance jump with the new cards leave it in the dust.

The chart on the left shows anisotropic filtering set to 8x and the chart on the right shows Antialiasing set to 4x. The gap between the Gigabyte 6600GT and the X700 Pro shrinks as the resolution increases. This is especially noticeable with antialiasing where the X700 Pro takes a very small lead at 1600x1200 with 4xAA.

With both antialiasing and anisotropic filtering on, the 6600GT still maintains very strong framerates at 1024. In fact, the hit with both AA/AF on at 1024 is pretty small compared to just AA or just AF. The 6600GT is clearly much better than the X700 Pro at 1024. However, as we increase the resolution to 1280, the gap between the GT and Pro is reduced significantly and they swap positions when we hit 1600x1200.