As you can see from the chart, the 800x600 resolution gives the best overall frame rates. At 1024x728 the game is still playable, but you can expect some hitching and slowdowns with multiple enemies on the screen. With only 128MB of video memory on-tap, at 1280x1024, DOOM3 played, not surprisingly, more like a slide show than a first-person shooter, even with antialiasing turned off (although 1600x1200 was selectable from the menu, the game wouldn’t run at that resolution, defaulting back to 640x480 after performing the required restart of the game after changing resolutions).
Half-Life 2
The follow-up to the most influential first-person shooter since id Software’s DOOM, Valve Software’s Sci-Fi first-person shooter epic powered by the Source engine, rivals the DOOM3 engine in both visual quality and the ability to push the video subsystem to the limit. Unlike DOOM3, you don’t spend 95% of your time in darkness or near-darkness in Half-Life 2, so visual jaggies from disabled or low levels of antialiasing are going to be more noticeable in the game.
The retail version of the game was patched with the latest updates downloaded from Valve’s Steam online service. The tests were performed at 800x600 and 1024x768— the two resolutions where the game was most playable—with 2x antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, and the High Quality setting enabled for all visual effects. Although the game looked better with 4x anisotropic filtering, the frame rates were way too choppy for comfortable gameplay, even when moving through a level with no enemies present.
Once again, the driver control panel was left at the default “Application Preference” for all quality settings and Vsync disabled. The benchmark was performed with the HardwareOC Half-Life 2 Benchmark Utility Version 1.4 (downloaded from Guru3D). The utility’s default maps—HardwareOC D13 C17, where Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance’s robot guardian Dog, attack a Combine checkpoint and Dog destroys a Combine APC; and HardwareOC Coast, where Gordon encounters City 17’s Ant Lions, were used.
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