Half Life 2 Performance

by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 1, 2003 11:48 PM EST
So of course the one thing everyone asked for was something I couldn't deliver for the first part of the Fall 2003 Video Card roundup - Half Life 2 performance. Of course there were requests for Doom3 performance and believe me, if we had the benchmarks we would definitely have included them. As you can guess, Valve has not released the Half Life 2 benchmark as originally expected and thus we don't have updated Half Life 2 numbers for you. The conclusion of the recent article did reference Doom3 and Half Life 2 performance however, and believe me I wasn't just pulling numbers and thoughts out of the air - I've got some basis for what I've said.

Here are some Half Life 2 numbers for you to look at; they were provided by a reliable source, but I could not verify anything myself so take them with a grain of salt. ATI was running in their DX9 codepath and the mixed mode codepath was used for NVIDIA. No AA/AF was enabled and we're looking at 1024x768 scores:

Half Life 2 Demo
Radeon 9800XT
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
e3_bugbait
71.4
73.9
e3_c17_01
57.6
57.5
e3_c17_02
49.9
49.3
e3_phystown
74.5
77.2
e3_seafloor
53.9
53.3
e3_techdemo_5
83.5
64.5
e3_techdemo_6
76.9
71.7
e3_under_02
77.3
71.1

If those numbers hold true then things definitely look better than from Half Life 2 day, but we'll reserve judgement until we get the benchmark in house. I just thought you'd like to see what we're seeing, I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on this data yet, just wanted to share :)

Tomorrow is my 8AM day again, and maybe I'll get those tests back that I took on Monday (hopefully not...I'd like tomorrow to be a good day :)...). I'm off to sleep, have a good night everyone. Derek and I will be back to work on Part II tomorrow; I'll update you as soon as I can.

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  • BeyondBeyond3D - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    Hahahaha... in the face of the MS and ATI's "let's make the R3xx design the actual DX9 spec" conspiracy, Nvidia comes to the rescue once more and makes their superior and flexible architecture beat the cronies at their own game. Look who have egg on their faces now :)
  • BeyondBeyond3D - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    Hahahaha... in the face of the MS and ATI's "let's make the R3xx design the actual DX9 spec" conspiracy, Nvidia comes to the rescue once more and makes their superior and flexible architecture beat the cronies at their own game. Look who have egg on their faces now :)
  • BeyondBeyond3D - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    Hahahaha... in the face of the MS and ATI's "let's make the R3xx design the actual DX9 spec" conspiracy, Nvidia comes to the rescue once more and makes their superior and flexible architecture beat the cronies at their own game. Look who have egg on their faces now :)
  • HawK - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    Think it is HIGHTIME that site owners & reviewers
    remember who is reading your "story's".
    You have an obligation to your readers to inform them with the thruth, and not to kiss and s#ck with your paymasters.
    In the last few weeks Anandtech has IMO shown on wich "side" they are on!
    And with this the final insult to me and your readers will end my visits to this site!.
    ps; I do not stand on one side or another. but I do care for good and honest information!!.
  • BetrayerX - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    You Anand defenders are missing one point.

    This is some dangerous marketing stuff, meaning some uninformed people that might buy an ATI card might now be confused or changing lanes to Cheatzilla.

    In other words it stops potential buyers who 'think' that info coming from such a "reliable source" (pun intended) should be taken seriously, just to find out later that the game might look like this:
    http://www.iol.ie/~baz8080/crap.jpg

    I, for a second, thought that [T] people hacked this site and posted their senseless blabbering.

    At least the source should have been revealed.

    To the guy on NVidias drivers:
    ATI may have bugs in games (and only if NOLF2 I have seen one), but when NVidia does them it affects hardware. I lost to GF2MX thnx to that "double speed bug after comming from standby" in 6.xx and 7.xx before I found out.
    How about the fan that doesn't spin?
  • Anonymous - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    Quote from Anand:

    "I just thought you'd like to see what we're seeing, I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on this data yet, just wanted to share :)"

    Half of you already did come to conclusions, you should be happy he shared this with you!
  • Anonymous - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    well you guys are seriously a bunch of ungrateful little sh*ts. this is his WEBLOG. it's NOT anandtech front page news-- it's something that he found interesting and decided to post in his friggin journal. i hope you sacs don't go on your friends xanga and ujournal pages and bitch and moan at them for writing about things they find interesting.

    if you don't like what you read here, go get your news somewhere else
  • zim2323 - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    I'm personally a fan of both Nvidia and ATI. They each have their plus and minuses. While the developers obviously have to worry about what is the best to develop for and obviously get tired of dealing with certain companies agendas *cough Nvidia cough*, I personally could care less as long the end result is that it works, regardless of cheats, optimizations, etc.

    To me, it all comes down to the games you play. If the games you play are largely DirectX games, then ATI is the way to go, but if you run OpenGL games, Nvidia is your choice. I own both a 5800 Ultra and an ATI 9800 Pro. In games like Battlefield that use DirectX, the ATI card averages about 5-10fps more than the Nvdia card. While in a game like Quake3, the Nvidia cards running in OpenGL run about 15-20pfs faster.

    The games I like to compare are the games that have both DirectX and OpenGL options, such as Nascar Racing 2003. On an Nvidia card in OpenGL, I get around 100-110fps, while in D3D I only get around 30fps. But on an ATI card, in OpenGL, I get around 20fps, but in D3D, I get 80-90fps.

    I think a lot of people forget that the graphics API makes a HUGE difference in performance, and as such is a key indicator in the type of performance you will get depending on the card you are using.

    Perfect example of this is Nvidia's capability to be "twice as fast" as the ATI in Doom3 (OpenGL), while the ATI is "twice as fast" as the Nvidia in Half-Life 2 (DirectX).

    While I have no affinity to either card manufacturer, Nvidia's drivers seem much more polished, while ATI's can be troublesome. ATI made drastic improvements with the Catalyst 3.7's and I was able to uninstall, install, overwrite, etc. those drivers many times with no real problems. Same could not be said for the older Catalyst drivers. So for that, I'm extremely pleased.

    What are your guys thoughts on this?
  • TMS - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    Go NVDA! Those are some schweeet numbers!
  • nyo - Thursday, October 2, 2003 - link

    Yeah, I'd hate to delve into that benchmark and discover all the cheats and shortcuts taken to achieve those numbers. I trust Valve more than "unnamed, but reliable sources".

    I think it's gonna take more than a driver update or two to dig the NV35 out of the mess it is currently in. nVidia shot and missed. Get with it.

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