Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
ATI & Valve - Defining the Relationship
The first thing that comes to mind when you see results like this is a cry of foul play; that Valve has unfairly optimized their game for ATI's hardware and thus, it does not perform well on NVIDIA's hardware. Although it is the simplest accusation, it is actually one of the less frequent that we've seen thrown around.
During Gabe Newell's presentation, he insisted that they [Valve] have not optimized or doctored the engine to produce these results. It also doesn't make much sense for Valve to develop an ATI-specific game simply because the majority of the market out there does have NVIDIA based graphics cards, and it is in their best interest to make the game run as well as possible on NVIDIA GPUs.
Gabe mentioned that the developers spent 5x as much time optimizing the special NV3x code path (mixed mode) as they did optimizing the generic DX9 path (what ATI's DX9 cards use). Thus, it is clear that a good attempt was made to get the game to run as well as possible on NVIDIA hardware.
To those that fault Valve for spending so much time and effort trying to optimize for the NV3x family, remember that they are in the business to sell games and with the market the way it is, purposefully crippling one graphics manufacturer in favor of another would not make much business sense.
Truthfully, we believe that Valve made an honest attempt to get the game running as well as possible on NV3x hardware but simply ran into other unavoidable issues (which we will get to shortly). You can attempt to attack the competence of Valve's developers; however, we are not qualified to do so. Yet, any of those who have developed something similar in complexity to Half-Life 2's source engine may feel free to do so.
According to Gabe, these performance results were the reason that Valve aligned themselves more closely with ATI. As you probably know, Valve has a fairly large OEM deal with ATI that will bring Half-Life 2 as a bundled item with ATI graphics cards in the future. We'll be able to tell you more about the cards with which it will be bundled soon enough (has it been 6 months already?).
With these sorts of deals, there's always money (e.g. marketing dollars) involved, and we're not debating the existence of that in this deal, but as far as Valve's official line is concerned, the deal came after the performance discovery.
Once again, we're not questioning Valve in this sense and honestly don't see much reason to, as it wouldn't make any business sense for them to cripple Half-Life 2 on NVIDIA cards. As always, we encourage you to draw your own conclusions based on the data we've provided.
Moving on…
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Anonymous User - Sunday, September 14, 2003 - link
Umm.. could you PLEASE not use shockwave for thosetables? Our firewalls & browser configs also won't let it through, so these reviews become pretty much useless to read.
Anonymous User - Sunday, September 14, 2003 - link
where are the benchmarks comparing HL2 at different CPUs? I mean, i obviously know I'm gonna have to upgrade my gf3 to a new card (first game to make me even think of that... didnt care for ut2k3), but what about my venerable athlon xp 1800+ ? :(Anonymous User - Saturday, September 13, 2003 - link
#98, look at the 9700 Pro numbers, subtract 4-5%.Still, if I were to see another set of benchmarks, I'd DEFINITELY want these:
GeForce4 MX440 OR GeForce2 Ti - As an example of how well GF2/GF4MX cards perform on low detail settings, being DX7 parts.
GeForce3 Ti200 OR GeForce3 Ti500 - It's a DX8 part, and still respectably fast; lots of people have Ti200s, anyway.
GeForce4 Ti4200 - This is an incredibly common and respectably fast card, tons of people would be interested in seeing the numbers for these.
GeForce FX 5600 Ultra - Obvious.
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra - Obvious.
Radeon 8500 - It's still a good card, you know.
Radeon 9500 Pro - Admit it, you're all interested.
Radeon 9600 Pro - Obvious.
Radeon 9700 vanilla - Because it would show how clock speed scales, and besides these (and softmodded 9500s) are quite common.
Radeon 9700 Pro - Obvious.
Radeon 9800 Pro - Obvious.
The GeForce FX 5200 and GeForce4 Ti4600 might be nice too, but the Radeons 9000 through 9200 would be irrelevant (R200-based).
Also, obviously, I'd like to see them on two or three different detail levels (preferably three), to show how well some of the slower ones run at low detail and see how scalable Source really is. Speaking of scalability, a CPU scaling test would be extremely useful as well, like AnandTech's UT2003 CPU scaling test.
This sort of thing would probably take a lot of time, but I'd love to see it, and I bet I'm not alone there. I think something like what AnandTehc did with UT2003 would be great.
Just my ~$0.11.
clarkmo - Saturday, September 13, 2003 - link
I can't believe the Radeon 9500 hacked to a 9700 wasn't included in the benchmarks. What was he thinking? I guess Anand didn't have any luck scoring the right card. There are some still available, you know.Anonymous User - Saturday, September 13, 2003 - link
Quote from the Irari information minister:"Nvidia is kicking ATI's butt. Their hardware is producing vastly superior numbers."
Anonymous User - Saturday, September 13, 2003 - link
Nvidia quote: "Part of this is understanding that in many cases promoting PS 1.4 (DirectX 8) to PS 2.0 (DirectX 9) provides no image quality benefit."3Dfx said some years ago that no one ever would use or notice the benefits of 32 bit textures. Nvidia did and 3Dfx is gone. Will Nvidia follow the 3Dfx path?
Anonymous User - Saturday, September 13, 2003 - link
Anyone remember when ati.com sold rubber dog crap?Pete - Saturday, September 13, 2003 - link
#74, straight from the horse's mouth:http://www.nvnews.net/#1063313306
"The GeForce FX is currently the fastest card we've benchmarked the Doom technology on and that's largely due to NVIDIA's close cooperation with us during the development of the algorithms that were used in Doom. They knew that the shadow rendering techniques we're using were going to be very important in a wide variety of games and they made some particular optimizations in their hardware strategy to take advantage of this and that served them well. --John Carmack"
Of course those D3 numbers were early (as are these HL2 ones), so things can change with updated drivers.
Anonymous User - Saturday, September 13, 2003 - link
I don't know if it has already been asked, but even if it has I ask again for emphasis.Anand, it would be nice if you could add a 9600 non-pro bench to the results. You mention raw GPU power being the determining factor now, and as the 9600 Pro's difference in memory clock is more significant than its engine clock, it would be interesting and informative to the budget/performance croud to note the 9600 non-pro performance in HL2.
Thanks for all your informative, insightful, accurate, in-depth articles.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I always find it interesting how people say ATI is the "little guy" in this situation.ATI has been a major player in the video card market since the eighties (I had a 16-bit VGA Wonder stuck in an 8-bit ISA slot in an 8088/2 system) and that didn't change much even when 3dfx came onto the scene. A lot of those voodoo pass through cards got their video from an ATI 3d expression or some other cheap 2d card (Cirrus Logic or Trident anyone?).
Nvidia and ATI have been at each others throats ever since Nvidia sold its first video card on the OEM market. 3dfx was just a little blip to ATI, Nvidia stealing away a bunch of its OEM sales with a bad 2d/good 3d video card on the other hand, well, that was personal.
I imagine someone at ATi saying something like this:
"All of you guys working on making faster DACs and better signal quality are being transferred to our new 3d department. Its sort of like 2d cept its got one more d, thats all we know for right now.".
ATI knows how to engineer and build a video card, they have been doing it for long enough. Same with Matrox (Matrox builds the Rolls Royce's of video cards for broadcast and video editing use), Nvidia on the other hand knew how to build 3d accelerators, and not much else. The 2d on any early Rage card slaughtered the early Nvidia cards.
Course, the 3d sucked balls, thats what a Canopus Pure 3d was for though.
Now ATI has the whole "3d" part of the chip figured out. The driver guys have their heads wrapped around the things as well (before 3d cards came around ATI's drivers were the envy of the industry). Its had many years of experience dealing with games companies, OS companies, standards, and customers. And its maturity is really starting to show after a few minor bumps and bruises.
ATI wants its market back, and after getting artx it has the means to do it. Of course, Nvidia is going to come out of this whole situation a lot more grown up as well. Both companies are going to have to fight blood tooth and nail to stay on top now. If they don't Matrox might just step up to the plate and bloody both of their noses. Or any of those "other" long forgotten video card companies that have some engineers stashed away working on DX 7 chips.
God knows what next month is going to bring.
Anyways, sorry for the rant..