Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (Direct X)


Lost Coast is the free technology demo that Valve created to show off their HDR rendering technique.  Because this method of doing HDR (high dynamic range) lighting uses integer math instead of floating point, both ATI and NVIDIA cards can do both HDR and AA at the same time. 

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 53

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 54

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 55

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 56

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 57

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 58

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 59

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI Performance Review - Graphics Cards 60

Lost Coast is an interesting scenario for SLI with the 8800 GTX.  While the average frame rates are seeing some dramatic increases, over 76% at 2560×1600, the minimum frame rates do not increase as much, especially at the lower resolutions of 1600×1200 and 2048×1536.  There are some spots in the game that are CPU limited enough that the extra power of the two 8800 GTX cards doesn’t get utilized fully.  Looking at the 1600×1200 results you can see that even with an average FPS increase of 36%, the minimum FPS was actually lower. 

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