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
Anand, change the title text!When I read this i get this image of u jumping up and down with a ATi flag advertising their hardware or something. Shitloads can can change before HL2 is released in November, and maybe it "rocks on nVidia" too on release.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
You'll lose some of the fancier water effects among other things. Turns of some mode of bump mapping on models too i think. Saw a chart once, you can try looking for it.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Um, whats diff. between running HL2 in DX8/9?Anyone?
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
I don't want to take this into fanboy territory, but valve weren't "crappy coding guys" when HL1 came out several years ago were they? In fact, one could argue that if HL2 was designed to work on systems that are 2+ years old they can't be all that bad can they?Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
I LOVE MY ATI 9700 PRO MUHAHA -=0)~Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Is it just me or is everyone ignoring the situation with Doom 3 benchmarks running noticeably faster on nVidia's hardware.Okay, lets try something; I'll restate what Anand said but swap nVidia for ATi and HL2 for Doom3:
"
- with the NV3x codepath, nVidia is the clear performance leader under Doom3 with the FX5900U hitting around 60 fps at 10x7. The R9800 is noticeably slower.
- the FX5700 ultra performs well, - it is a good competitor of the R9800;
- nVidia didn't need these special optimizations to perform well and Carmack insists that they have not optimized the game specifically for any vendor.
Okay, just to make sure guys, go read Anand's Doom3 article. You'll see all the above holds, (if you extrapolate what we know, the FX5700 bit too).
You've also got to remember regardless of designs/pipes/whatever, *both* the FX59 and R98 are about 120M transistors, and nVidia is actually clocking these transistors faster (tho ATi can make up for this by using 24bit instead of 32bit per unit memory). Unless nV's engineers were plain stupid desiging the chip (unlikely), they have hardware that's easily on level with R98, and later driver's are likely to exploit this further. ATi's basically been optimising their R300/350 for years now, there's probably not nearly as much headroom for compiler optimisations in later drivers.
Basically I think when the Det.50's come out, the FX59 will even up with the R98 in HL2, and totally trounce it in Doom3. Maybe not, but just thought I'd restore some balance here :)
nV basically overshot a bit with their NV3x hardware generation while ATi stuck to DX9 fundamentals, so they've been sorta screwed from the start. I reckon they'll kick ass with NV40 though. I hope ATi do as well!
GS
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
#21 Doom III 's looks with Half-Life's 2 interaction ("great gameplay") could be possible, with both great framerates @ ATi and Nvidia cards. But NOT with valve's crappy coding guys behind the wheel. That takes a Carmack or Sweeney.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Bruhahaha nvidia fans, in your face! Sure glad I cashed out for a 9700 :)Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
How about Half-Life 2's great gameplay versus the Doom 3's horrible didn't-I-do-this-before-in-the-first-two-Dooms-and-all-the-Quakes?Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Maybe valve just can't code ? It's the other way around on Doom III. Half Life's 2 crap looking engine versus Doom III great looking engine.