NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX GPU Review

Half-Life 2 Engine 7 – Town

Half-Life 2 (Direct X)

This was one of the most anticipated games in PC history, and even with the troubles it has had with Steam, HL2 drives-on as a great game and great benchmark for PC systems.  Below are the default settings we used for our testing today.  Actually, we enabled Reflect All instead of Reflect World and AA and AF were enabled where indicated.

Here is a typical scene from our Town run through:

Surprisingly, the 7800 GTX isn’t much faster than the X850 XT PE in this level of HL2, though it does blow away the previous NV40 flagship card by quite a lot.  Without AA and AF enabled the 7800 GTX holds a comfy 20 FPS or so lead but once the detail is reved up, it only leads by roughly 8fps.

In terms of our SLI performance, we can see that without AA and AF enabled, the benefit to SLI is almost non-existant here.  Once we do enabled them, the dual GPU setup sees a healthy 30 FPS increase in average frame rate.  Again, note that the single 7800 GTX is nearly as fast as the 6800 Ultra in SLI mode!