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
i'm sure it nvidia will release drivers that will make it much more competitiveAnonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Yeah, #6, that's it. They're in bed together.It can't possibly be how slowly NV3X runs the ARB2 rendering path, NV3X's extreme brute force approach, or the massive fundamental differences between NV3X and R3XX. It has to be a conspiracy!
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
yo anand, its rejoice not rejoyceAnonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Illogical to code a game that won't perform well with Nvidia cards. I guess Valve and ATI are in bed together.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Sweet jesus!Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
People who bought Radeon 9500 Pros before prices went sky high, people who bought Radeon 9500s and soft-modded them, you may now spend the next week laughing at people with GeForce FX 5600s. Ready.. set..dvinnen - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
not it softmods just fine. Runs hella fast and all. Just some driver issues. For like a week no OpenGL programs would work. Did everything I could think of short of reformatting, couldn't get it to work. Then one day it just started working at random, go figure.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
You said bad things about your 9500? What the.. oh, wait. Was it a 9500 plain that refused to softmod? In that case, ouch :(I'm really happy I decided to go with an ATI card. It's no 9800 Pro, but it should come close.
dvinnen - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Lord,Forgive me of all the bad things I've said about my 9500. I take them back now.
Sucks to be a nVidea owner eh?