Episode 1 is Valve’s latest expansion to Half-Life 2 which was primarily distributed through Steam. Historically a test that usually works pretty well with the Radeon architecture, this will be an excellent test to see the value of a 8800 GTX SLI system compared to Radeon X1950XTX Crossfire. We tested with the game running at resolutions of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 pixels. For the first test we used 4xAA and 16xAF, in the second test we used HDR with 16x AF, and in the last test, Lost Coast, we used 4xAA and 16x AF.

In the first test, the GeForce 8800 GTX SLI system is faster than all other solutions by a long shot. The GeForce 8800 GTS SLI system also manages to make it over 100 FPS at 2560x1600 and has an overall performance of second place. With HDR enabled, the X1950XTX Crossfire solution performs quite well, outdoing the 8800 GTS SLI in order to gain second in overall performance. Despite this, the 8800 GTX SLI system is still the fastest.

Two GeForce 8800 GTS cards under SLI end up having performance comparable to the Radeon X1950XTX Crossfire. Ultimately, though, the Radeon X1950XTX Crossfire system is faster than the 8800 GTS SLI system. The GeForce 8800 GTX SLI still is the fastest solution and holds a large margin of advantage over the Radeon X1950XTX Crossfire solution.