Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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.
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atlr - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Quote from http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863...
"The Radeon 9600 Pro manages to come within 4% of NVIDIA's flagship, not bad for a ~$100 card."
Anyone know where a ~$100 9600 Pro is sold? I thought this was a ~$200 card.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Time to load up on ATI stock :)Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Quoted from Nvidia.com:"Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Optimizations and Support
Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX 9 applications."
Oops, not this time around...
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#74 - No, D3 isn't a DX9 game, its OGL. What it shows is that the FX series isn't bad - they just don't do so well under DX9. If you stick primarily to OpenGL games and run your DX games under the 8.1 spec, the FX should perform fine. It's the DX9 code that the FXes seem to really struggle with.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#74: I have commonly heard this blamed on a bug in an older release of the CATALYST drivers that were used in the Doom3 benchmark. It is my understanding that if the benchmark was repeated with the 3.7 (RELEASED) drivers, the ATI would perform much better.#75: I believe this goes back to prior instances where Nvidia has claimed that some new driver would increase performance dramatically to get it into a benchmark and then never release the driver for public use. If this happened, the benchmark would be unreliable as it could not be repeated by an end-user with similar results.
Also, the Det50 drivers from Nvidia do not have a working fog system. It has been hinted that this could be intentional to improve performance. Either way, I saw a benchmark today (forgot where) that compared the Det45's to the beta Det50's. The 50's did improve performance in 3DMark03 but no where near the 73% gap in performance seen in HL2.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Because Gabe controls how representative the hl2 beta is of the final hl2 product but he cannot control how representative the nvidia det50 beta is if the final det50s.And besides that there have been rumours of "optimalisations" in the new det50s.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
How is it that Gabe can recommend not running benckmarks on an publicly unavailable driver or hardware, yet the game itself is unavailable? Seems a little hypocritical....Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I didn't have time to look into this but can someone enlilghten me as to why the 5900 Ultra outperformed the 9800 PRO in the Doom 3 benchmarks we saw awhile back...is that not using DX9 as well? If I am way off the mark here or am even wrong on which outperformed which go easy on the flames!Thanks
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
"Not true, the 9500 is a true DX9 part. The 9600 does have faster shader units though."My bad, should have looked at ATI first. I guess I'm thinking about the 8500. Either way, I would still go 9600 Pro, especially given that it is cheaper than a 9500 non-pro.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
"The 9600 fully supports DX9 whereas the 9500 does not."Not true, the 9500 is a true DX9 part. The 9600 does have faster shader units though.