Half Life 2: Lost Coast

Those of you who are regular visitors to the site will have seen our recent article on Lost Coast and our visit to Valves offices. To bring yourself up to date with all the juicy information on Lost Coast read our article here:

Basically Lost Coast adds HDR lighting to the Source Engine and uses a method which allows non Shader Model 3 hardware to utilise the technology. Thanks to Valve we have been given access to Lost Coast and so have been able to run the cards through some benchmarks to let you see how they perform.

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In our Crossfire review we noted that there were a few driver issues with NV hardware and Lost Coast. The 78.xx series drivers that were released at the time didn’t run Lost Coast and the 80.xx series drivers had texture issues. There have been 2 driver releases since then which resolve the concern. 78.05 allows Lost Coast to run on the 7 series drivers and 81.84 fixes the texture issues we experienced with the 8x.xx drivers, therefore we have Lost Coast running on NV hardware without issue (and without any major change in FPS). Good fast updates from Nvidia.

With the enhanced clocks in action we can immediately see the advantage of buying the Asus GTX TOP. Whether it be min, max or average FPS the card improves your gaming experience when playing Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. Framerates throughout were excellent on both cards and as they remained over 30fps the game wasn’t in the slightest bit stuttery.