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Half-Life Episode 1 is the latest expansion pack of Half-life 2. It is distributed through Steam, Valve's content delivery system. The benchmark is run at 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 with anti aliasing at 4x in one test and HDR enabled in the other. Both tests have anisotropic filtering set at 16x. The benchmark is run using the HOCbench PC-Space demo.

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Prey is based on a modified version of the Doom 3 engine. We test using hocbench with the hwzone demo on a retail version of the game patched to version 1.3. The chosen resolutions are 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. All testing is done with 4x anti aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

The ASUS GeForce 8600 GTS is the lead performer in the Half Life 2 benchmarks. The main performance difference between the GTS cards can be attributed to clock frequency. The ASUS card
has the highest operating frequencies, and thus it scores 10-16% higher in the benchmarks compared to the numbers obtained by the standard clocked cards, which are the Foxconn and Gigabyte 8600 GTS boards.

The GeForce 8600 GT solutions offer performance comparable to standard clocked 8600 GTS cards at all resolutons, even with HDR enabled at 1600x1200. The same cannot be said for the 8500 GT video card. It isn't able to offer fluid gameplay at higher resolutions with filters enabled.

With filters enabled and 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering Prey proves to be too overbearing for the cards in the test at resolutions of 1920x1200 and 1600x1200. Performance numbers are different for 8600 GTS solutions at 1280x1024. Again, a general trend we've been seeing is that the fastest cards receive the highest scores. For the 8600 GT and 8500 GT cards the tests indicate that either filters or resolution would have to be toned down to play at a more comfortable frame rate.