ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe - Page 10

Half life 2

Half life 2 is no doubt the most anticipated pc game of all times. Gamers keeping the excellence of Half Life 1 in their mind as well as the remarkable E3 demo preview, have been anxiously waiting for the much delayed release of HL2.

Regarding the storyline, the player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people he cares about are counting on him.

Characters - Advanced facial animation system delivers the most sophisticated in-game characters ever seen. With 40 distinct facial "muscles," human characters convey the full array of human emotion, and respond to the player with fluidity and intelligence.

Physics - From pebbles to water to 2-ton trucks respond as expected, as they obey the laws of mass, friction, gravity, and buoyancy.

Graphics - Source's shader-based renderer, like the one used at Pixar to create movies such as Toy Story® and Monster's, Inc.®, creates the most beautiful and realistic environments ever seen in a video game.

AI - Neither friends nor enemies charge blindly into the fray. They can assess threats, navigate tricky terrain, and fashion weapons from whatever is at hand.

To measure performance we used the Video Stress Test(VST) that is available in the CounterStrike:Source beta available through Steam. We set all the details to the highest level and changed the resolutions from 800x600 to 1600x1200.

The overall performance of the SLI 6600GTs was slightly lower than the 6800Ultra's performance. But it is very interesting to see SLI behavior under heavy processing loads and under low graphics processing demands. You can see that with lower resolutions, the SLI cards are stuck at 143fps, almost 50fps lower than the MSI card, but with 1600x1200, the difference is down to 5fps. As more GPU power is needed under higher resolutions, the second card takes more of the load, not letting the average fps reported drop below 117. You will notice this behavior in most applications/games.

When setting Anisotropic Filtering to 8x and Anti-Aliasing to 4x, the performance of the SLI ASUS 6600GT and 6800Ultra drop as expected. However, the ASUS Extreme combined cards reported 46fps, a not so small number afterall.