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.

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.

Disregarding the first two resolutions as the cards perform at levels too high for the CPU to keep up, we see that the X800XL delivers excellent frame rates compared to both the 6600GT and the 6800Ultra. Even though the latter is of course more powerful than the XL, the performance difference in this benchmark is not in proportion to the difference in price.

Enabling Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic-Filtering, the NVidia card's performance declines much faster than the XL's. As a result, at 1600x1200 we have the 6800 Ultra leading only by 4fps and the N6600GT dropping down to 28fps, 49fps lower than the X800XL.