Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
By now you've heard that our Half-Life 2 benchmarking time took place at an ATI event called "Shader Day." The point of Shader Day was to educate the press about shaders, their importance and give a little insight into how ATI's R3x0 architecture is optimized for the type of shader performance necessary for DirectX 9 applications. Granted, there's a huge marketing push from ATI, despite efforts to tone down the usual marketing that is present at these sorts of events.
One of the presenters at Shader Day was Gabe Newell of Valve, and it was in Gabe's presentation that the information we published here yesterday. According to Gabe, during the development of Half-Life 2, the development team encountered some very unusual performance numbers. Taken directly from Gabe's slide in the presentation, here's the performance they saw initially:
Taken from Valve Presentation
As you can guess, the folks at Valve were quite shocked. With NVIDIA's fastest offering unable to outperform a Radeon 9600 Pro (the Pro suffix was omitted from Gabe's chart), something was wrong, given that in any other game, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra would be much closer to the Radeon 9800 Pro in performance.
Working closely with NVIDIA (according to Gabe), Valve ended up developing a special codepath for NVIDIA's NV3x architecture that made some tradeoffs in order to improve performance on NVIDIA's FX cards. The tradeoffs, as explained by Gabe, were mainly in using 16-bit precision instead of 32-bit precision for certain floats and defaulting to Pixel Shader 1.4 (DX8.1) shaders instead of newer Pixel Shader 2.0 (DX9) shaders in certain cases. Valve refers to this new NV3x code path as a "mixed mode" of operation, as it is a mixture of full precision (32-bit) and partial precision (16-bit) floats as well as pixel shader 2.0 and 1.4 shader code. There's clearly a visual tradeoff made here, which we will get to shortly, but the tradeoff was necessary in order to improve performance.
The resulting performance that the Valve team saw was as follows:
Taken from Valve Presentation
We had to recap the issues here for those who haven't been keeping up with the situation as it unfolded over the past 24 hours, but now that you've seen what Valve has shown us, it's time to dig a bit deeper and answer some very important questions (and of course, get to our own benchmarks under Half-Life 2).
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Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Anand: When you re-test with the Det 50's, make sure you rename the HL2 exe!!!Gotta make the comparison as fair as possible...
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#69 How does the 9500 not fully support DX9? It's the same core EXACTLY as the 9700.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#53 - So YOU'RE that bastard who's been lagging us out!!! Get out of the dark ages!Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
What kind of conclusion was that ?In terms of the performance of the cards you've seen here today, the standings shouldn't change by the time Half-Life 2 ships - although NVIDIA will undoubtedly have newer drivers to improve performance. Over the coming weeks we'll be digging even further into the NVIDIA performance mystery to see if our theories are correct; if they are, we may have to wait until NV4x before these issues get sorted out.
For now, Half-Life 2 """ SEEMS """ to be best paired with ATI hardware and as you've seen thorugh our benchmarks, whether you have a Radeon 9600 Pro or a Radeon 9800 Pro you'll be running just fine. Things are finally """heating up""" and it's a good feeling to have back...
HL2 ""seems"" better on ATI??? , should be, HL2 looks way better and faster on ATI.
Things are finally """heating up""" ??? shoul have been , ATI's performance is killing Nvidia's FX.
The conclusion should have been :
Nvidia lied and sucks , Valva had to lower standard ( actually optimize (cheat) in favor of Nvidia) and make HL2 game look bad , just so you could play on your overpriced Nvidia Fx cards.
How about a word of apology from Anand to have induced readers in errors , and have told them to buy Nvidia Fx card's in is last Fx5900 review. ???
From a future ATI card owner, (bundled with HL2 of course)
Boy I'm pissed off!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
82, those are 9600 regulars (!), click the links. Pricewatch has been fooled. A Pro isn't much more, though, just about $136.I'd go with a 9500 over a 9600 any day. The 9500 can be softmodded to 9700 performance levels (about 50-70% of the time, IIRC, and it's actually a little cheaper than the 9600 Pro!). If the softmod doesn't work out, then you return it for a new one. Of course, not everyone wants to do this, and a 9600 Pro is a respectable and highly overclockable card.. but..
I'd still love to see 9500 Pros at lower prices, like they would have been if ATi had kept it out.. but whatever. If you don't know, the 9500 Pro is/was considerably faster than the 9600 Pro. Valve said that HL2 isn't memory-limited, so the 128-bit memory interface on the 9500 Pro (which never made a big difference vs. the 9700 anyway) shouldn't even be noticeable, and the fact that the Sapphire-made ones were just as overclockable as the 9500 regulars and 9700s (think up to 340 core, 350 if you're lucky) is going to make it one HELL of an HL2 card for the $175 most people paid.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Nvidia got schooled, but not on hardware or drivers. ATI locked this up long ago with their deal with Gabe and buddies.Why is everyone just trying to keep a straight face about it? ATI paid handsomely for exactly what has happened to NVidia.
But as always happens, watch out when the tables turn, as they ALWAYS do, and Valve could be on the OUTSIDE of lots of other deals.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I am just glad there is finally a damn game that can stress out these video cards. Wonder if Bitboys Oy of whatever there name is come out saying they have a new video card out now that will run Half Life 2 at 100+ FPS :) What made me think of them I have no idea!Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Not to detract from the main issue here, but #19 raises a good point. Why does the 9600Pro lose only <1% performance going from 1024 to 1280? The 9800P and 9700P lose between 10-15%. The 5900U loses 30%, sometimes more. I wonder if the gap between the 9800P and 9600P shrinks even more at higher resolutions.What aspect of the technology in the 9600 could possibly account for this?
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#81 You can find 9600pro's for ~$160 from newegg.A couple of small webstores have a "Smart PC 9600" non-pro 128 meg for <$100. But the smart pc card is a cheap oem unit...I'm not sure if it's as good as the more expensive 9600's.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Pricewatch:$123 - RADEON 9600 Pro 256MB
$124 - RADEON 9600 Pro 128MB