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 what Lost Coast is
about you can read that article here.
The basic info you need though is that Lost Coast
adds HDR lighting to the Source Engine and uses
a method which allows non Shader Model 3 hardware
to utilise the technology. Lost Coast is a free
download available to all HL2 owners.
At 1600x1200 we see that
results follow the trends of recent reviews with
the Nvidia single card solution outscoring the competing
part from ATI, though with the release of the X1800
XTPE we have a much closer battle than before. Looking
at the dual card solutions we see there are some
very good gains to be had from both companies and
in the end the ATI cards come out on top, though
not by any amount noticeable when playing.
Moving up to 2048x1536 we
see that the performance leader for the dual card
systems changes to NV, and in this test it is by
a reasonably significant amount. Infact the 7800GT
SLI system comes very close to the X1800XT Crossfire
setup in regards to outright performance levels.
Single card scores show the 512mb GTX just outscoring
the XTPE.
