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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
169 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
24, NV3x codepath translation: Render with crappy precision because our card can't handle real DX9 rendering at anything faster than a snail's pace.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Fudge, I guess I will wait for the 9800XT cause those numbers off the 9800 Pro are pitiful. But certainly not as pitiful as Nvidia. Nvidia, you lost this round. See ya next year.digitalwanderer - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
If ATI does hold slim lead, I'm sure GeForce FX 5950 will remedy that or an optimized driver update. :-)Yeah ATi holds a slim lead...with their mid-range card over nVidia's best! :lol:
nVidia's day of reckoning is coming...probably tomorrow. ;)
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
im so happy, I have a radeon 9600 pro, and im just so very happy.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
"Half-Life 2 has a special NV3x codepath that was necessary to make NVIDIA's architecture perform reasonably under the game;""Valve insists that they have not optimized the game specifically for any vendor."
Don't these statements seem to contradict each other? I assume the first is Anand's opinionated statement. The second is Valve insisting no optimizations. I have to believe the second.
If ATI does hold slim lead, I'm sure GeForce FX 5950 will remedy that or an optimized driver update. :-)
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Buggy? ATI cards have some of the worst drivers in existence if your not playing brand spanking new games.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Well, I've been waiting for HL2 to be released before getting my new vid card, but I guess this clinches it. It'll be ATI. :) Heck, if I'm lucky maybe there'll be a 9900 pro out by then. :)AgaBooga - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
In an interview with Gabe Newell, here: http://www.gamersdepot.com/interviews/gabe/001.htm he mentions FSAA. I wonder if they worked everything out and got it working...NerdMan - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Figures, Nvidia's "code it crappy now, fix it later" mentality finally bit them in the ass. They shove this crappy code out that barely works in the minor games, and then release optimizations... errrmm.. patches... for every major game.Stick with good 'ole ATI. Sure, their drivers might be slightly buggy, but at least they actually fix the problems.
AgaBooga - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Rmember, we still know very little about performance even though he said that it is getting 60 FPS at 1024x768 on the 9800 Pro. Does that mean with Anti Aliasing on or off? How about Anisotropic Filtering? You can't just forget those guys when you argue the 9800 performs better.Until we see exactly is being used in the tests, we can't accurately judge the performance.
Also, the comment about it runing in dx8 on 5200 and 5600 cards means that they understand the market and are making it playable. When they commented some time back about it running on a 4600, you have to remember that was when there was lots of debate regarding AA issues and they weren't very sure. That was one problem they saw more towards Nvidia and said they can try and make a work around for ATI cards.
Also, we've seen the wonders Nvidia can do with drivers some time back, and so we can expect something to change the situation now. I'm sure that Nvidia has known about these problems and is working on fixes or enhancements for its speed.
Let me also say that I'm not saying ATI isn't doing good, they are doing great and this is something that has fallen at a very good time frame if they can get the next generation cards to outdo Nvidia because the 9700 and 9800 have given them the higher performance for a much longer time.
What I'm looking forward to is seeing the AA and AF results as well as if they made any other optimizations such as for hyper threading...