Half life 2 is no doubt the most anticipated pc game of all times. Gamers keeping the excellence of Half Life 1 in their mind as well as the remarkable E3 demo preview, have been anxiously waiting for the much delayed release of HL2.

Characters - Advanced facial animation system delivers the most sophisticated in-game characters ever seen. With 40 distinct facial "muscles," human characters convey the full array of human emotion, and respond to the player with fluidity and intelligence.

Physics - From pebbles to water to 2-ton trucks respond as expected, as they obey the laws of mass, friction, gravity, and buoyancy.

Graphics - Source's shader-based renderer, like the one used at Pixar to create movies such as Toy Story® and Monster's, Inc.®, creates the most beautiful and realistic environments ever seen in a video game.

AI - Neither friends nor enemies charge blindly into the fray. They can assess threats, navigate tricky terrain, and fashion weapons from whatever is at hand.

To measure performance we used the Video Stress Test(VST) that is available in the CounterStrike:Source beta available through Steam. We set all the details to the highest level and each time changed the resolution from 800x600 up to 1600x1200.

At 800x600 resolution, the AOpen cards are only 1fps away from 200fps. There is a big difference between the 6800Ultras SLI and the 6600GTs SLI and this difference remains even at higher gaming resolutions. It should also be noted, that even the CPU load is greatly reduced when HL2 is loaded, because the GPU now takes most of the graphics load.

At low resolutions, fps values are similar to before, but as we move to higher resolutions and especially above 1280x1024, the fps values are greatly reduced. On the other hand, 118fps is the lowest value that we got at 1600x1200, which is more than we expected to see. Excellent performance with Half Life 2.