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 think the chances of successfully suing nVidia for misrepresentation and fraud will go over as successfully as that one against Intel for the P4's lack of performance. Anyone notice how it just sort of faded from the media spotlight and then dried up? Never sue a big corporation under a Republican government: Nobody gives a shit about the people - a kinder gentler America: Step over the little guys, not on them.Vis a vis Doom III, I remember reading just recently on HardOCP or ShackNews that TeH Carmack wasn't too impressed with the N3x cards either, and had to write a special mixed-mode path to address performance issues too.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
it sounds to me like MOST of you guys are all prepubescents, in which case i can understand 99 posts over such a stupid post in the first place.NVIDIA will find a way to patch their crap.
And in any case, as if any one game ever determines the merit of a graphics cards, please, wake up kids.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
*Where the hell did that pitchfork go*Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
Something somewhere went wrong. And that something happened to be Nvidia AGAIN. There should be a class action lawsuit for fraud against Nvidia Selling supposed DX9 cards when the game publisher and Microsoft say that Nvidia wasnt following the DX9 coding standard. And toboot Gabe says that it took them 5 times longer to code for Nvidia cards which brings the cost of the game higher. So here you have the game being written in DX8 code for the Fake DX9 Nvidia cards to be playable. As Gabe sayed " Id be pissed " if I owned a Nvidia card.So for all the people that paid such a high price for your 5900 ultra get together and sue Nvidia. These companies have to be stopped sometime and be accountable for their actions. You have Gabe with all the proof you need to show fraud.Stand up and be counted and tell them " Your Not Going To Take It Anymore"
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
I feel fairly unbiased in saying this (as my current card of choice is an integrated Intel810 graphics chip *wooo*) but I think it *isn't* fair to start abusing nVidia over this surprising lack of performance. My hat goes off to ATI, because if you look at what they've done as a company with their line of products from the Mach64 in the past to being an industry leader today (which they share with nVidia), then there has been an amazing amount of growth. The flip side is that nVidia has also achieved great things and is actually a younger company. It's already been mentioned that nVidia pioneered (*awaits flames*) 32-bit rendering depth, when the industry was focused on 16-bit (and back in those days I owned and endorsed 3dfx stuff, but once you see games like Quake3, UT running in 32-bit the difference was noticable), and the reason nVidia did well was because they made good products. All I can say is wait for the final product, and let us all remember that 3dfx dominated the 3D hardware market in the gaming community, and then they bet it all on some so-so hardware and lost.One last thing:
If you look at the full-range of current and upcoming games, then nVidia and ATI share the benchmark-leads together, but in a lot of reviews I've seen the 5900 Ultra wins over the 9800Pro, then vice-versa. You can almost compare it to the CPU field where Intel dominates performance, but loses on price. (IMHO)
With all that said I will probably buy a 9600Pro, and an Athlon, because of the price/performance ratio, and I'm confident I'll at least get playable performance on HL2 and Doom3.
Thanks,
etherboy
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
Seems like NVidia fooled buyers selleing dx9 card especially in the low end of the market.I just bought a 5200 card after seeing some benchmarks and seeing nothing really faster on the ATI side (9000, 9100, 9200).
The point was : at equal price and perf. I take the DX9 card for the future.
Now I feel fooled :(
NerdMan - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
A lot of people here are comparing DOOM III to HL2. This is just not possible. You have to remember that DOOM III was coded using the OpenGL API and HL2 was coded using the Direct3D API.With that said, OpenGL is a bit more flexible with support for hardware, since it's open-standard. Direct3D, on the other hand, is a bit more rigid in it's design. It takes 2 years for a GPU to be designed. These chips were being designed long before MS nailed down DX9 spec. Nobody is really to blame, Nvidia just picked the wrong way to design their card for DX9 compatibility.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
Has anyone here actually put both a 9800 and 5900 side by side on a bench with HL2 ? , no ....then shut up LMAO.You all follow the crowd like sheep BAHHHHHHHHHH
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
Anybody got any specs for R360? - looks like I'm buyin ATI from now on...Icewind - Thursday, September 11, 2003 - link
What makes this even sadder is the little Nvidia fanboys trying to cover up for Nvidia. Pathetic.