For our Half-Life 2 benchmarks we tested at a variety of resolutions, including 1280x1024, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The first and second tests on this page were tested with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled. The second test on the page was run with HDR enabled along with 16x anisotropic filtering. The demo we used for the Half-Life 2 Episode 1 tests was trdem1 provided by The TechReport. Performance was tested with Half-Life 2: Loast Coast using HOCBench at resolutions of 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.

The results are definitely very interesting. When 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic are enabled in Half-Life 2 Episode 1, the game actually performs better with the 320 MB 8800 GTS at lower resolutions. However, as we move to 2560x1600 we see a large drop in performance, and the 320 MB 8800 GTS ends up at 48.6 frames per second, 105.4 frames per second less than at 1920x1200. The terrible performance scaling seen here as the video card moves on to higher resolutions is no doubt a downside of the smaller memory the card comes equipped with. With anti-aliasing enabled at such high resolutions, the 320 MB 8800 GTS cannot handle the stress as efficiently as the 640 MB card.

With HDR enabled and AA disabled, the picture changes significantly for the 320 MB 8800 GTS. In fact, the video card is able to outperform the 640 MB 8800 GTS at every resolution, including 2560x1600. The card's victory can be accredited to its faster core/memory frequencies, and since Half-Life 2 is less memory intensive with AA disabled, the card is able to perform quite well at 2560x1600. Performance scaling is also improved, and although we still do see a drop in FPS, it is on par with the 640 MB 8800 GTS' performance.

With Lost Coast, the picture changes completely for the 320 MB 8800 GTS yet again. Enabling 4x AA and 16x AF creates an extreme bottleneck for the 320 MB card, and the game has a large drop in performance moving from 1280x1024 to 1920x1200. Performance stays relatively the same in the move to 1600x1200, but setting the resolution to 2560x1600 drops performance all the way down to 14 frames per second. Interestingly enough, though, the 320 MB 8800 GTS actually ends up with lesser performance than the GeForce 7900 GTX, which is only a 256 MB part.