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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.