Half Life 2: Episode Two

Plainly, the R4850 was going to do so much better than the 8600GT here and it certainly doesn't disappoint despite the nearly matching lines above. A big jump from High settings, Reflect World at 1280x800 up to the games maximum settings (with my Dell 20” Widescreen) of Very High Textures, High all other settings, Reflect All at 1680x1050. For the 8600GT, we got 2xMSAA and 8x Anisotropic Filtering, but the R4850 just about allowed for 8xMSAA (highest possible) and 16x Anisotropic Filtering. Dropping down to 4xMSAA didn't impact the visual quality all that much and allowed for an incredibly smooth game with virtually no drops below 60FPS.

Crysis

The 8600GT tries hard, but even with medium settings it's still not great. The motion blur helps, but the experience is just so much better with the R4850. Same resolution, but the majority of settings are higher and the visual impact reflects this. Objects Quality had to remain on medium setting, but all others were set by the benchmark tool to in game High settings, DirectX 10 for both.