Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview

Half-Life 2 Performance - e3_techdemo_5.dem

In our first test, we see that ATI holds an incredible lead over NVIDIA, with the Radeon 9800 Pro outscoring the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra by almost 70%. The Radeon 9600 Pro manages to come within 4% of NVIDIA's flagship, not bad for a ~$100 card.

Although it looks much worse than the other competitors, the GeForce4 Ti 4600 running in its DX8 code path manages to offer fairly decent frame rates - outperforming both of the mainstream FX parts. The Radeon 9200 has a good showing here, but exhibited a number of visual artifacts during the testing that could impact performance. So, we'll reserve judgement on that part until everything gets worked out between it and the game.

At 1280x1024, we're shading more pixels and thus the performance difference increases even further, with the 5900 Ultra being outperformed by 73% this time around.