Half-Life 2 is a popular franchise and we benchmark the video cards using Episode Two with the aid of HOC Half-Life 2 Episode Two benchmarking utility using the “HOC Demo 1” provided by this program. We ran the game under 1024x768 with no anti-aliasing and bilinear filtering, i.e. using the lowest image quality possible. The results, given in frames per second, you see below.

On this game the on-board video from ECS A790GXM-A Black Series (AMD 790GX) achieved the same performance as a 64-bit Radeon HD 3450, which is remarkable. The on-board video from the reviewed motherboard was 30.30% faster than the one from Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G (AMD 780G) and 126.32% faster than the one from ECS GF8200A Black Series (nVidia GeForce 8200).

Enabling Hybrid CrossFire technology performance increased 50% compared to the Radeon HD 3450 alone with the on-board video disabled. This is impressive, especially because you gain this performance boost for free if you have a compatible video card.