Half-Life 2 (PC Games, 2004)

If it seems like PC game fans have been waiting forever for Half-Life 2 (buy it), it's only because they have. The original game was released six years ago, and raised the bar on first-person shooters so high that it created astronomical expectations for the sequel. Fortunately, the game has seemed to live up to these expectations.
The original Half-Life made great strides in gameplay, but the graphics engine wasn't quite the kind of cutting-edge code that made it the subject of numerous benchmarks. Half-Life 2 is different. The first game was based on the Quake engine but with scores of modifications (especially to lighting and animation systems). Valve developed its own cutting-edge engine for Half-Life 2, called Source. It's a complete DirectX 9 graphics engine that scales back to even DX7 rendering if you have a very old video card, and it produces some of the most impressive visuals we've ever seen on a PC.

Performance in Half-Life 2 is going to be a key metric for video cards. The Source engine it is based on has already been licensed for several other games, one of which (Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines) is already on the shelves. More than that, the original Half-Life was host to dozens of fantastic multiplayer mods, including perhaps the most popular online shooter of all time, Counter-Strike. We have no reason to believe that Half-Life 2 won't spawn a similar mod community. In other words, Half-Life 2 performance will probably be a useful video card metric for a long time to come.