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

1600x1200 0aa 16xAF : HDR Enabled

2048x1536 0aa 16xAF : HDR Enabled

Whilst performance in HL2 is getting a little less important that will soon change with the release of the Aftermath expansion pack later this year so having the fastest card around in HL2 will again influence a lot of sales. If Aftermath was released tomorrow its clear to see that ATI would have the highest performing solution on the market. The single XTX manages to outscore the GTX SLI system by a few fps and the single 512mb GTX by a further few FPS. X1900 crossfire though hands out a massive beating to every other card on the market with an astounding 95fps, a full 30fps better than any other non X1900 series card.

Moving out settings up to 2048x1536 we see that the results follow a similar trend on the X19 Crossfire with a hefty performance advantage. Comparing the single XTX to the SLI system we see that the XTX comes in just a little slower, though not by much. Quite impressive when you consider that's a single card just loosing out to the dual card solution.