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 each time changed the resolution from 800x600 up to 1600x1200.

At 800x600, the X800XT was severely limited by the CPU so as we can see, the N6600GT from Asus manages to achieve similar performance. However, the lower performance of the MSI NX6600GT at 800x600 is not at all due to CPU limitations. As we increase the resolution, the difference between it and the Asus N6600GT slowly diminishes but even at 1600x1200 there's still a noticeable 22 fps gap.

When we enable 4x Anti-Aliasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering, with the first two resolutions all of the cards offer excellent performance. However, when we reach 1280x1024, the 6600GT from MSI can no longer keep up with the other two cards and is clearly outperformed by the Asus N6600GT. Finally, at 1600x1200, the highest resolution, only the performance monster X800XT PE is left standing, able to deliver sufficient framerates.