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 - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
haha take that blind nvidia fanboyssome people will do anything to defend Nvidia
digitalwanderer - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
ROFLMFAO~~~~~I could have sworn I mentioned somewhere here before that the truth would come out in the fullness of time...I guess the time is full now!
To any nVidia enthusiasts saying that the Det 50s will fix this, you might want to check out our story on the Det 50s over at www.elitebastards.com ....they're comparable in performance to the 45.23 set! :lol:
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
surely its close to illegal what theyre doing - unfair practices / stifling competiton like microsoftAnonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
"Gabe Newell: Valve and NVIDIA both know that we have a lot of shared customers, and we've invested a lot more time optimizing that rendering path to ensure the best experience for the most customers." - Makes you wonder what would happen if they hadn't. 20fps anyone?Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Here's something very interresting that sort of answers my question:http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware/video_cards/at...
(benchmark results)
-Big D.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
#24, who cares about D3?!? Doom is the same ole crap it always was! Nothing's changed. It's not 1996 anymore :PAnonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Boy am I glad I bought a 9800Pro just yesterday! Decided to skit nvidia for the first time in years, and it seems I did the right choice! Phew!Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
#40 i think if you have low end gfx cards they want you to run it in dx6#39 vice city is a terrible game
gta3 great vice city is fucking shit dribbling out of a gorillas ass in comparison
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
It makes sense if you think of it in terms of what kind of detail you'll be able to milk out of the card. GeforceFX will play HL2 better than GF2, but not at the level you would you expect for a premium price card.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
HAHAHA Nvidia had it coming to them, like to see them "Optimize" this one.