News: Half Life 2 : Lost Coast Benchmarks

This is the new level that features HDR technology. I'm not sure when it is due out (I think sometime in October), but it really does look stunning. The guys over at Bit-Tech ran some benchmarks and shared their results. Looks like HDR takes a 10-20 fps hit.

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We learned last week in our Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Hands On preview that Valve coded four different HDR renders before they were happy. One of the key reasons for this is the fact that most ATI and NVIDIA cards have slightly different featuresets. So while one approach to HDR utilised certain Floating Point operations, it only worked on one group of cards.
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Read the rest of the article <a href="http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2005/09/21/lost_coast_benchmark/1.html">here</a>

Looks nice, and a 10-20 fps hit isn't that bad considering how high today's cards can go..

I still think it's overdone though. They're trying too hard to show it off and the result is way too much glow.. :\ but I guess that's the point of this level. Buildings don't glow like this (http://www.bit-tech.net/content_images/lost_coast_benchmark/eyecandy2.jpg) last time I checked, even with the sun beating down on it.. unless we're talking about a glass curtainwall.

i think this is one of the things you need to see in action, on your pc, to get the full effect. i agree, glow can be very annoying (see guild wars for example) but this is different.

Yea I'll reserve my final judgement till I can play it myself.. even then it's only this one level, I'm sure in the future it'll be used in more subtle ways.