Half-Life 2 is the latest game from Valve that pushes the limits of the DirectX 9 graphics to provide an extremely immersive environment. Benchmarking was conducted using the HardwareOC Half-Life 2 benchmark program. The demo file used for the tests was the d3c171 and was run always in the Max Detail setting.
The results without the anti-aliasing or anisotropic are interesting because they show no significant performance differences between the single card or SLI mode. This shows us the game at these settings is CPU limited rather than limited by the graphics processor. As the settings are enabled though, things begin to change.
As the AA and AF settings increase, the non-SLI modes start getting lower frame rates, but the SLI mode still runs at roughly the same frame rate as if the settings were not enabled. At the 16x AF and 4x AA settings, the game has a 33% performance increase that is below what we might expect but it appears that this mode is still CPU limited.
The AutoOC feature from the NVIDIA driver worked without any problems at the lowest quality settings, but once the AA and AF modes were enabled, artifacts started showing up on the screen such that it was very unplayable. These results were dropped from the charts.
Overall, Half-Life 2 is very playable at the 1280x1024 resolution with the 4x AA and 16x AF mode even with a single card. The SLI mode would allow playing at even higher resolutions such as 1600x1200.
