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 - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
This is almost sadistic, declaring a deadline for something this eagerly awaited and not doing anything. Other staffers seem to be awake, though.. SAVE THE WORLD PLEASE etc etcAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Did you guys hear that Anand is coding for 3drealms, now? :PAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
im going to bed ZzzZZzzZZZzZZZZZz...Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
anand's done this before (next week we will..., we will look at X 2 weeks from now..., etc) without any results. Not that I'm having a go, his journalism is fantastic - but better to *mean* what you say when you say these things. It comes across as rather unprofessional otherwise.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
*leaves angry* Now I'll be dead tired for school AND no article :(Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Maybe they're putting the finishing touches on it? Serious though, keeping people waiting like this... ten minutes is perfectly fine, thirty is barely acceptable. I bet it'll come at like 4:30AM :PuncJIGGA - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
where it at???Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
its freaking 12:30am and still no benchmarks. Good Night.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I'm calling it a night at 12:30... :(Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Agreed.