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. 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.

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 81.82 fixes the texture issues we experienced with the 8x.xx drivers so now we have Lost Coast running on NV hardware without issue (and without any major change in FPS).

With these issues resolved we were hugely interested to see how the 7800 and X1800 stacked up against each other with HDR in use. Before we look at that though its interesting to see the huge performance increase in this engine when you compare the results of the X800XT, ATI’s last generation part, to the new X1800. In lost Coast the X1800XT manages to exactly double the Average FPS achieved by the X850XT.

The figures for the new X1800XT when compared to the 7800 GTX are no less impressive, the 13fps advantage for the Radeon is a good improvement over the NV part though not surprising when you consider HL2 has always performed better on ATI parts. If you are lucky enough to have a 7800 GT/GTX SLI rig you’ll be reaching the levels of the X1800XT though so its always worth considering that upgrade path.