Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview

Half-Life 2 Performance - e3_c17_02.dem

Here we see something very interesting, and something we haven't really seen before - the Radeon 9600 all the way up to the Radeon 9800 Pro performing within 12% of each other. This is because with shader-heavy games, such as Half-Life 2, the bottleneck is no longer memory bandwidth - rather it is pure computational power; basically, how quickly these GPUs can process through those shader programs.

The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is just edged out by the Radeon 9600 Pro. What's even more interesting is that NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4600 manages to beat all of the other contenders quite well - granted that the Ti 4600 doesn't look as good as it is using the base DX8.0 code path.

The Radeon 9200 puts up a good fight; however, there were some rendering issues during the benchmark, which may invalidate this score. We'll have to wait for the final build to see if things change any.

At 1280x1024, a smaller subset of the cards were run. You can tell why just by looking at the frame rates. Interestingly enough, the Radeon 9600 Pro comes out ahead here by a slight margin over the Radeon 9700 Pro - possibly due to its updated architecture. The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra still lags behind. This time, even more significantly because of the fact that we're shading many more pixels at a higher resolution.