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. We also included the result achieved by a 64-bit Sapphire HD 3450 card installed on the motherboard PCI Express x16 slot and disabling the motherboard’s on-board video, so we can have an idea of the performance of a very low-end video card compared to the on-board video of the reviewed motherboard. The results, given in frames per second, you see below.

GeForce 9300 achieved a good very good performance on Half-Life 2: Episode Two for an embedded video solution. A Radeon HD 3450 was “only” 15% faster than GeForce 9300, which achieved twice the performance of Intel G31, Intel G33 and Intel G45 and was 233% faster than GeForce 7100.