Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
Valve had very strict requirements about the test systems they let us use. The systems were only allowed to use publicly available drivers and thus, we used NVIDIA's Detonator 45.23s and ATI's Catalyst 3.7s, both publicly available from the respective websites.
The Dell PCs that we used were configured with Pentium 4 3.0C processors on 875P based motherboards with 1GB of memory. We were running Windows XP without any special modifications to the OS or other changes to the system.
We ran a total of three levels on each card - e3_techdemo_5, e3_bugbait and e3_c17_02, all of which were part of the E3 demos that were shown and are representative of actual game play under Half-Life 2.
We ran all cards at 1024x768, and the highest end cards at 1280x1024. We also used the best possible shader setting for the hardware, meaning that the R3x0 hardware used the DX9 code path, the 5900 Ultra used the NV3x code path and everything else used the DX8.x code path.
All tests were run without Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering enabled. Anti-Aliasing was not properly supported in this demo and thus wouldn't be representative of final game play.
We only tested with a 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro as a 256MB card wasn't available at the time (all of our 256MB cards were tied up in Athlon 64 testing). The performance difference between 128MB and 256MB is negligable; although time permitting, we may see some higher detail textures offered for 256MB card owners. We'll see what happens once the game ships though.
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Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I perviously posted this in a wrong place so let me just shamelessly repost in here:Let me just get my little disclaimer out, before I dive into being a devil's advocate - I own both 9800pro and fx5900nu and am not biased to neither, ATi or nVidia.
With that being said, let me take a shot at what Anand opted not to speculate about ant that is the question of ATi/Valve colaboration and their present and future relationship.
First of all, FX's architecture is obviously inferior to R3x0 in terms of native DX9 and tha is not going to be my focus. I would rather debate a little about the business/finacial side of ATi/Valve relationship. That's the area of my expertise and looking at this situation from afinacial angle might add another twist to this.
What got my attention are Gabe Newell presentations slides that have omitted small but significant things like "pro" behind r9600 and his statement of "optimiztions going too far" without actually going into specifics, other than new detonators don't render fog. Those are small but significant details that add a little oil on a very hot issue of "cheating" in regards to nVidia's "optimizations". But I sopke of inancial side of things, so let me get back to it. After clearly stating how superior ATi's harware is to FX, stating how much effort they have invested to make the game work on FX (which is absolutely commendable) I can not help but notice that all this perfectly leads into the next great thing. A new line of ATi cards will be bundeled with ATi cards (or vice versa), and ATi is just getting ready to offer a value DX9 line. Remember how it was the only area that they have not covered and nVidia was selling truckloads of FX5200 in the meantime. After they have demonstrated how poorly FX flagship performs, let alone the value parts, is't it a perfect lead into selling shiploads of those bundeled cards(games). Add to that Gabe's shooting down of any optimization efforts on nVidia's part (simply insinuate on "chaets") and things are slowly moving in the right direction. And to top it all off, Valve expilcitley said that future additions will not be done for DX8 or so called mixed class but exclusively DX9. What is Joe consumer to do than? The only logical thing - get him/herself one of those bundles.
That concludes my observations on this angle of this newly emerged attraction and I see only good things on the horizon for ATi stockholders.
Feel free to debate, disagree and criticize, but keep in mind that I am not defending or bashing anybody, just offering my opinion on the part I considered equally as interesting as hardware performance is.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Wow...I buy a new video card every 3 years or so..my last one was a GF2PRO....hehe...I'm so glad to have a 9800PRO right now.Snif..I'm proud to be Canadian ;-)
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
How come the 9600 pros hardly loses any performance going from 1024 to 1280? Shouldn't it be affected by only having 4 pipelines?Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
MUHAHAHA!!! Go the 9600pros, i'd like to bitch slap my friends for telling me the 9600's will not run half-life 2. I guess i can now purchase an All-In-Wonder 9600pro.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Man, I burst into a coughing/laughing spree when I saw an add using nVidia's "The way it's meant to be played" slogan. Funny thing is, I first noticed the add on the page titled "What's Wrong with Nvidia?"Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
booyah, i hope my ti4200 can hold me over at 800x600 until i can switch to ATI! big up canadaAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
You can bet your house nvidia's 50 drivers will get closer performance, but they're STILL thoroughly bitchslapped... Ppl will be buying R9x00's by the ton. Nvidia better watch out, or they'll go down like, whatwassitsname, 3dfx ?dvinnen - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Hehe, I concer. Seeing a 9500on there would of been nice. But I really want to see is some AF turned on. I can live with no AA (ok, 2x AA) but I'll be damn if AF isn't going to be on.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Anand, you guys rock. It's because of your in depth reviews that I purchased the Radeon 9500 Pro. I noticed the oddity mentioned of the small performance gap between the 9700 Pro and the 9600 Pro at 1280x1024. I would really like to see how the 9500 Pro is affected by this (and all the other benchmarks). If you have a chance, could you run a comparison between the 9500 Pro and the 9600 Pro (I guess what I really want to know if my 9500 Pro is better than a 9600 Pro for this game).Arigato,
The Internal
Pete - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
(Whoops, that was me above (lucky #13)--entered the wrong p/w.)