Halo is a sci-fi shooter that takes place on a mysterious alien ring-world. Packed with combat, Halo will have you battling on foot, and in vehicles, inside and outdoors with Alien and Human weaponry. Your objective: to uncover Halo’s horrible secrets and destroy mankind’s sworn enemy, the Covenant.

The game supports the latest shader technology of pixel shaders 2.0. Of course the graphics are somewhat better on PC than Xbox, since most of the game's shader effects have been redesigned to support the latest 2.0 shaders in DX9. Having in mind that there are few games supporting 2.0 pixel shaders, Halo is a good test for VGA cards performance on the shader technology.

A prominent disadvantage of the game is its lack of Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering support. If you get the funny idea to enable these settings via the control panel of your card, you will experience no difference in graphics quality as well as this would slow things down and lose performance.

Halo also supports pixel shaders 1.1 that offer better performance in the cost of quality.

- Halo Benchmark

For the Halo benchmark we the default settings with pixel shaders 2.0 in the following resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and the awesome 1600x1200. We used the -timedemo command to run the default benchmark.

We run the timedemo using high quality settings for textures and particles. 42 fps it's a quite good score, but at the 1600x1200 resolution frames dropped way under 30 fps. Keep in mind that under 30 fps the decrease of performance is visible to the human eye. But let's see what Ms Croft has to say.

- Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness

A series of grisly murders brings Lara into conflict with a sinister Alchemist from the past, and a secret alliance of powerful individuals shrouded in mystery. Accused of the murder of her one time mentor, Werner Von Croy, Lara becomes a fugitive on the run. Pursued by the police, she follows the Alchemist into a dark world of blood, betrayal and vengeance where it is up to her to defeat this unholy alliance, and stop them from unleashing their incredible powers on the world.

Angel of Darkness employs a brand new engine with Lara now made up of over 5,000 polygons as opposed to just 500 in previous Tomb Raider games. The range of special effects create a batch of cool visuals.

From the many kinds of water (mercurial liquid forms, good surface texturing, and realistic pools of water) to fire (heat blurs and colorful fiery pits), to the game's many light effects (lots of shadowing, multiple light sources and effective reflections), Core mixes more realistic settings with special effects to create a well-rounded whole. It is wothmentioning though that Tomb Raider: AOD uses pixel shader 2.0 technology on a higher extent than Halo does.

- Tomb Raider:AOD Benchmark

We recorder a timedemo on the Paris stage. The particular scene where the timedemo was recorder, is full with complicated fire effects. This benchmark stresses a lot the cards' pixel shading process and we believe that this is the ultimate pixel shader 2.0 game benchmark.


We grabbed the fps from the timedemo twice. Once with the Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering off (Trillinear was used instead), and once more with AA at 4x and Anisotropic Filtering mode enabled from the game's settings console .

Even with the high quality settings disabled, the difference is apparent. Aeolus FX 5900 XT is way behind ATI's cards presenting only 34 fps even at the 1024x768 resolution.

Enabling AA and AF things look worse. Even the renowned Radeon 9800 XT returned the unacceptable frames at the 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions.It seems that if you wish to play this game with decent frames, low down the quality settings and avoid high resolutions.

Till now AOpen's Aeolus FX 5900 XT brought decent results in our benchmark suite. Many were the times the card managed to beat the FX 5900 and in a few cases managed to catch up with ATI's PRO card. Now let's see if Aeolus has something better to offer regarding it's overclocking capabilities.