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
Nvidia is, I bet, a bit desperate about this. How else do you explain those ridiculous "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" logos they're marketing so agressively?Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Oh well, at least I only have a Ti4200 so it doesn't come as such a shock that performance will be sucky! It'll be ATI for me next time for sure. If the 9800Pro is pulling 60fps at 1024x768 and is way ahead of the FX... wow, I feel for you owners of $400 FX5900's.AgaBooga - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
You know Anand, I somehow had a feeling you were working up a Half Life 2 article or a Doom 3 article... maybe I'm starting to pay too much attention to your writing ;)Its good to see an article from you after so much time! :)
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
im glad i got the 9700pro, it was that or wait until nv came out w/ a competing card when i bought itAnonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Somewhat of an odd news piece. oh well good to see i have the right video card though =)Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Thats the most shocking news i have came upon in my gaming life... i feel sad for this with FX cards... Lets face what if this was not Nvidia cards, but ATI cards, i would have been really sad.sandorski - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Glad I went with a 9600 Pro, though Nvidia wasn't tempting for me at any rate. Dasm though, what happened to Nvidia?Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
#4, im one of the early 9500 pro owners and im LMAO with u =)Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
This is kinda good news.I'm guessing he has the Half Life 2 benchmark Valve was talking about when HL2 was first announced, you know, the benchmark that was supposed to come out 2-3 weeks before HL2 shipped?
Steam comes out tomorrow, so maybe the Benchmark will follow, and thats why he can't post now?
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Or #6 yea there in bed, ati paid valve a ton of money just so it would run like crap on nvidia's hardware.I mean come on, its becuase Nvidia went the cheap ruote on their cards, they put in crap for hardware muscle to push dx9.