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.
The NVIDIA Vista driver fails to impress under Half-Life 2: Lost Coast; with the 7900 GTX performance drops by 22% at 1600×1200 while the flagship 8800 GTX performance drops by 52% mainly due to a much lower maximum FPS. At the 2560×1600 resolution that we had enjoyed so much under Windows XP and the 8800 cards NVIDIA’s Vista performance is 43% slower than in Windows XP and the minimum FPS is 25% lower and because of that was noticeably choppier during game play.
Update (2/13/07): NVIDIA was able to help find a solution to what appears to be a VERY dramatic performance drop in this title. See our conclusions page for the information.
AMD’s X1950 XTX performance in Lost Coast under Windows Vista is nearly a mirror image of that under Windows XP.
