A much better post, now you sound more like you know what you're talking about, rather than just tagging comments in a similar vein to sound "in the know" (something that irritates me on
my forums).
I've already read that article, and considered it, but I have always had this weird compulsion to only put Nvidia GFX cards in Intel systems, and only put Radeon in AMD systems. Since I currently have an Intel system I have GeForce for now.
For a long time, new games pushed the limits of hardware to the max, but in recent times this has dropped off as the system development has rapidly outstretched the game development. Only the very latest set of "next generation" games is actually beginning to use the massive power of the latest PCs - so it came as quite a shock to me to realise that it was in fact my system RAM that was insufficient, rather than my GFX or processor. It has been a very long time indeed since I've had to upgrade my system to play a new game! It sounds daft, but it's something I like, because it makes me feel as if progress is being made!
To be fair, the graphics on the HL2 engine are awe inspiring, and again it's some time since a new engine or title has provoked this feeling of "wow".
I read Anandtech as well as various other review/comparison sites regularly and I still maintain that the benchmarks they offer are only a cursory basis for comparison, on the grounds that at normal resolutions and game settings there is little or no difference in card capability between GeForce and Radeon.
I mean honestly, who plays a game at 1600x1200??!
I am not sure if you are into online competative gaming, but in most cases even people with the absolute cremde-de-la-creme of systems still tend to turn all the fancy graphics right down as low as possible to get the maximum performance for competativeness, so again, the bells and whistles that are at the core of Anandtech benchmarks are largely irrelevant. Most people I know even go so far as to disable Anti Aliasing, Vertical Synch and Antisotropic filtering, as well as reducing image quality as low as it goes.
With that said, from personal experience only, with full graphical acceleration and options turned on, I have never noticed a single problem with Half-Life 2 or any of the games with the HL2 engine. Up until VTM:Bloodlines of course, but even then, once I upped my system ram I can play the game perfectly with not the slightest glitch and all settings turned up full.
If I increased my resolution from 1024x768 to something silly I might notice a difference but, as I said before, who really plays at those insane resolutions?!
