While Soldier of Fortune may not be as popular as Half-Life Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike, it does have the Ghoul rendering system going for it. You'll be hard pressed to find a game that depicts more realistic player reactions that those in SoF.

Soldier of Fortune - 800x600x32bpp

And with the Gold Edition of the game, there are more multi-player maps to keep the action fresh. Again, I chose to empahsize image quality over performance and although SoF supports DirectX and S3 texture compression, I disabled them. Here are the settings I used:

• Hardware Ghoul Lighting
• Specular Lighting
• Maximum Detail Texturing
• Trilinear Texture Filtering
• High Texture Quality
• High Texture Format
• Default Sound

Although SoF supports EAX, it's much too taxing on the frame rate and I opted to use the default sound effects.

Soldier of Fortune Results

Again, both the NVIDIA and X-Micro GeForce2 MX cards offer similar performance. Most of the resolutions and color depths show in the benchmark results are suitable for on-line gaming. However at a resolution of 1024x768 in 32-bit color performance was sluggish with the settings I used.

Soldier of Fortune - 800x600x32bpp

Unlike the moving sky in Quake 3, the sky in Quake 2 engine based games such as Soldier of Fortune remains static. However, this outdoor scene looks very nice at a resolution of 800x600 in 32-bit color using high quality textures. You can even make out the enemy carrying our flag in the distant background.

Soldier of Fortune - 800x600x32bpp

Soldier of Fortune also comes with it's share of unique special effects.

Unfortunately I've been unable to get any existing benchmarks for Half-Life to run due to the various updates to the game. But that's not a problem as Half-Life get's more playing time than any other game on our two PCs. With two teenagers and their friends playing every day, it's about time for me to purchase a third PC.

With the GeForce2 MX it is possible to play Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Stirke at a resolution of 1280x960. All you need is a reasonably fast processor and play in 16-bit color. Dave does it in Counter-Strike and Steve in TFC.

Counter Strike - 1280x960x16bpp

Teammates in Counter-Strike are your best friends.

Counter Strike - 1280x960x16bpp

Head shot!

Team Fortress Classic - 1280x960x16bpp

You'll want to stay clear of enemy medics in Team Fortress Classic.

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