Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Half-Life 2 Performance - e3_c17_02.dem
Here we see something very interesting, and something we haven't really seen before - the Radeon 9600 all the way up to the Radeon 9800 Pro performing within 12% of each other. This is because with shader-heavy games, such as Half-Life 2, the bottleneck is no longer memory bandwidth - rather it is pure computational power; basically, how quickly these GPUs can process through those shader programs.
The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is just edged out by the Radeon 9600 Pro. What's even more interesting is that NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4600 manages to beat all of the other contenders quite well - granted that the Ti 4600 doesn't look as good as it is using the base DX8.0 code path.
The Radeon 9200 puts up a good fight; however, there were some rendering issues during the benchmark, which may invalidate this score. We'll have to wait for the final build to see if things change any.
At 1280x1024, a smaller subset of the cards were run. You can tell why just by looking at the frame rates. Interestingly enough, the Radeon 9600 Pro comes out ahead here by a slight margin over the Radeon 9700 Pro - possibly due to its updated architecture. The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra still lags behind. This time, even more significantly because of the fact that we're shading many more pixels at a higher resolution.
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Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Anand, when using the Print Article feature in Mozilla 1.4, I was shown only graphs from one map throughout. For instance, after clicking Print Article, all graphs were of the bug level. Hitting F5 showed them all to be of techdemo. In both cases, some graphs didn't correspond to your comments.This may be b/c the article was just posted, but thought I'd give you a heads-up anyway.
Thanks for the interesting read, and hopefully we'll see screenshots of the differences between the DX8.0. 8.1, 8.2, NV3x, and DX9 modes soon (the only thing lacking from this article, IMO)!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
.. goddammit, all the flashes are arranged improperly. (Techdemo on bugbait pages, city on techdemo...) FIX IT.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I was hoping anand would compair a 128mb 9800pro to a 256mb one, guess I'll still have to wait =(Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Hey Anand, you have a 9500 Pro lying around?Eh, well, it doesn't need to be included anyway. We all know how it would do: 5% worse than the 9700 Pro.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#5 & #6 : +1I ll keep my G4 Ti 4200@300/600.
I m sure HL² will still rocks in DX 8.1
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Where are the numbers with AA/AF enabled? I know the article intimates that there's a negligible performance hit, but I'd still like to see the numbers.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Man, the Ti series has been doing this for a while!http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID...
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I feel the same way about the GF4Ti series. Never did like the FXes much...Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Hahahahaha.Go you Ti4600, GO! I BELIEVE IN THE Ti4600!
If all I am going to lose is a bit of image quality, then no great loss. At least it isn't back to 640x480!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Wow 9800 pro barely edges out 9700 pro. 9600 pro seems to be the best deal if people are still waiting to upgrade.Obviously Nvidia lost this round with nv30 and nv35.