Big GPU Shootout – Revisited

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Half-Life 2 is still a popular game and it is the oldest game we review for this series. Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is an additional level for this 2004 game. Lost Coast was released October, 2005 as a free download to all purchasers of Half-Life 2. Lost Coast was developed as a playable tech demo that was evidently intended to showcase the newly-added high definition range (HDR) lighting features of the Source Engine. A flyby of this level is played during the HL2 video stress test and it is very repeatable. All in-game settings are maxed out, including 4xAA/16xAF.  We had issues with Source engine stop responding on our Nvidia partition that we did not resolve during our testing of GTX 280 and GTS 250, so there are no results for these two video cards.

Now at 1650×1080 resolution:

And now at 1440×900:

Although all of our configurations breeze through this benchmark, the HD