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
Anand, when using the Print Article feature in Mozilla 1.4, I was shown only graphs from one map throughout. For instance, after clicking Print Article, all graphs were of the bug level. Hitting F5 showed them all to be of techdemo. In both cases, some graphs didn't correspond to your comments.This may be b/c the article was just posted, but thought I'd give you a heads-up anyway.
Thanks for the interesting read, and hopefully we'll see screenshots of the differences between the DX8.0. 8.1, 8.2, NV3x, and DX9 modes soon (the only thing lacking from this article, IMO)!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
.. goddammit, all the flashes are arranged improperly. (Techdemo on bugbait pages, city on techdemo...) FIX IT.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I was hoping anand would compair a 128mb 9800pro to a 256mb one, guess I'll still have to wait =(Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Hey Anand, you have a 9500 Pro lying around?Eh, well, it doesn't need to be included anyway. We all know how it would do: 5% worse than the 9700 Pro.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#5 & #6 : +1I ll keep my G4 Ti 4200@300/600.
I m sure HL² will still rocks in DX 8.1
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Where are the numbers with AA/AF enabled? I know the article intimates that there's a negligible performance hit, but I'd still like to see the numbers.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Man, the Ti series has been doing this for a while!http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID...
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I feel the same way about the GF4Ti series. Never did like the FXes much...Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Hahahahaha.Go you Ti4600, GO! I BELIEVE IN THE Ti4600!
If all I am going to lose is a bit of image quality, then no great loss. At least it isn't back to 640x480!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Wow 9800 pro barely edges out 9700 pro. 9600 pro seems to be the best deal if people are still waiting to upgrade.Obviously Nvidia lost this round with nv30 and nv35.