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 - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#61.. i take it YOU have the money to shell out for top of the line hardware ????????? i sure as hell don't, but like #42 said, " more widely used comp "i my self am running a 1700+ at 2400+ speeds, no way in hell am i gonna go spend the 930 bucks ( in cdn funds )on a 3.2c P4, thats NOT inc the mobo and ram, and i'm also not gonna spend the 700 cdn on a barton 3200+ either, for the price of the above P4 chip i can get a whole decient comp, may not be able to run halflife at its fullest, but still, i'm not even interested in HL2, it just not the kind of game i play, but if i was, whay i typed above, is still valid..
anand... RUN THESE HL2 BENCHES ON HARDWARE THE AVERAGE PERSON CAN AFFORD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! not he spoiled rich kid crap .....
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#42 "...should have benchmarked on a more widely used computer like a 2400 or 2500+ AMD...":The use of 'outdated' hardware such as your 2400 AMD would have increased the possibility of cpu limitations taking over the benchmark. Historically all video card benchmarks have used the fastest (or near fastest) GPU available to ensure the GPU is able to operate in the best possible scenario. If you want to know how your 2400 will work with HL2, wait and buy it when it comes out.
In reference to the 16/32 bit floating point shaders and how that applies to ATI's 24 bit shaders:
It was my understanding that this quote was referencing the need for Nvidia to use it's 32 bit shaders as future support for its 16 bit shaders would not exist. I don't see this quote pertaining to ATI's 24 bit shaders as they meet the DX9 specs. The chance of future HL2 engine based games leaving ATI users out in the cold is somewhere between slim and none. For an example of how software vendor's react to leaving out support for a particular line of video card, simply look at how much work Valve put into making Nvidia's cards work. If it was feasible for a software vendor to leave out support for an entire line like your are refering to (ATI in your inference) we would have had HL2 shipping by now (for ATI only though...).
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
58, http://myweb.cableone.net/jrose/Jeremy/HL2.jpgAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Are pixel shader operations anti-aliased on current generation video cards? I ask because in the latest Half Life 2 technology demo movie, anti-aliasing is enabled. Everything looks smooth except for the specular highlights on the roof and other areas, which are still full of shimmering effects. Just seems a little sore on the eyes.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
An observation:Brian Burke = Iraqi Information Officer
I mean this guy rode 3dfx into the dirt nap and he's providing the same great service to Nvidia.
Note to self: Never buy anything from a company that has this guy spewing lies.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
OK, this article was great.For us freaks, can you do a supplement article. Do 1600x1200 benchmarks!!!
Things will probably crawl, but it would be nice to know that this should be the worst case at this resolution when ATI and NVidia come out with next gen cards.
Also, was any testing done to see if the benchmarks were CPU or GPU limited? Maybe use the CPU utilization montior in Windows o see what the CPU thought. maybe a 5.0 GHz processor down the road will solve some headaches. Doubtful, but maybe....
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Whats really funny is that Maximum PC magazine built an $11000 "Dream Machine", using a GeforeFX 5900 and i can built a machine for less then $2000 and beat it using a 9800 pro.Long Live my 9500 pro!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I can play Frozen Throne and I am doing so on a GeForce2MX LOL (on a P2@400mhz).Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
look at my #46 posting - i know it's different engines, different API's, different driver revisions etc...but still it's interesting..
enigma
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#52 different engines, different results. hl 2 is probably more shader limited than doom 3. The 9600pro has strong shader performance, which narrows the gap in shader limited situations such as hl 2.btw, where did you get those doom 3 results? Only doom 3 benches I know about are based off the old alpha or that invalid test from back when the nv35 was launched...