Breaking News: Halflife 2 Performance Revealed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2003 7:02 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
You'll see my own numbers tomorrow night at midnight, but we've been given the go ahead to reveal a bit of information about Half-Life 2. I'll keep it brief and to the point and will explain it in greater detail tomorrow night:
- Valve is pissed at all of the benchmarking "optimizations" they've seen in the hardware community;
- Half-Life 2 has a special NV3x codepath that was necessary to make NVIDIA's architecture perform reasonably under the game;
- Valve recommends running geforce fx 5200 and 5600 cards in dx8 mode in order to get playable frame rates.
- even with the special NV3x codepath, ATI is the clear performance leader under Half-Life 2 with the Radeon 9800 Pro hitting around 60 fps at 10x7. The 5900 ultra is noticeably slower with the special codepath and is horrendously slower under the default dx9 codepath;
- the Radeon 9600 Pro performs very well - it is a good competitor of the 5900 ultra;
- ATI didn't need these special optimizations to perform well and Valve insists that they have not optimized the game specifically for any vendor.
There you have it folks, there's much more coming tomorrow.
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Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
I find this all quite fascinating. Half life was the first game i played on the first computer i owned. I was running nVidia then and have been since (current = Ti-4200). I am about to upgrade and have been researching for hours a day about latest DX9 cards and must say that without question, ATI will be getting my cash this time...and from everything ive read/seen/heard...they have produced a superior product...PERIOD (please no "in the future..." posts cause i could be dead before nVidia catches up...i care about NOW)Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
I've never owned an ATI card and I've owned more than a few nVidia cards (currently a 4600 in my main rig).. so I think I can make this statement without bias:Some of you guys are desperate to make yourselves feel better about your ultra expensive nVidia FX cards. It's pathetic and sad.
Personally, I am going to wait and see how my 4600 will run HL2 before deciding if I need to upgrade (I can live without max eye candy)... and if I do I will probably buy an 9600Pro simply because it seems it might be the best price/performance value for HL2.
I have LITTLE patience for buggy drivers though and find my 4600 w/40.72 Dets to be ultra stable so ATI's drivers better not piss me off. :D
dvinnen - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
God, I love all the nvidiots out ther saying valves programers suck. Everything is not software, it is mustly hardware problems. Valve came up with a work around for nVidia not following spec. Be happy with that. Just because nVidia made "Wonder" drivers a couple years ago dosen't mean that it always works out that way. DX9 calls for 20 bit percision. That's what ATi uses and what Valve decided to use. Nvidia decided to use 16 and 32 for some reason. This is why nVidia doesn't liek 3dMark03. Because they didn't follow spec, they are mad about it.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
Geezus I'm not sure which fanbois are worse, the nvidiots or the fanATIcs (DigitalWanderer et al). Right now I'm leading towards the fanATICs but only because the nvidiots are more less hushed up these days.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
#64: Where was #63 saying that nVidia cards were the best? He simply said Valve programmers suck. You sound like the fanboy.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
#63 Give it up. Your Nvidia fanboy days are over with. Your card failed, period.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
It is pretty remarkable - Valve have come out and said "Well, ATI cards are great and they work properly, but nVidia cards don't run properly. Also we can't make FSAA work in our game, we don't know how. But we're really good programmers and it's the nVidia card that is at fault."Obviously Valve has a different team of developers since they did the original Half-Life.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
Care to explain how does a video card that has only 9.6gb/s 9600 Pro bandwidth manage to shame 27.2gb/s 5900 Ultra?give it about a month for Valve to release a patch for Nvidia cards. Pretty stupid of 'em to do so.
Shimmishim - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
You are such a tease Anand...do you do this to your girl as well? :)
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
31, If making a game run properly on NV3x hardware entails not using proper DX9 high precision rendering, then yes.. Valve is guilty of optimizing for ATi. Otherwise, nobody is to blame but Nvidia (for designing the NV3x), and Microsoft (for designing the DX9 specifications).