Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
Valve had very strict requirements about the test systems they let us use. The systems were only allowed to use publicly available drivers and thus, we used NVIDIA's Detonator 45.23s and ATI's Catalyst 3.7s, both publicly available from the respective websites.
The Dell PCs that we used were configured with Pentium 4 3.0C processors on 875P based motherboards with 1GB of memory. We were running Windows XP without any special modifications to the OS or other changes to the system.
We ran a total of three levels on each card - e3_techdemo_5, e3_bugbait and e3_c17_02, all of which were part of the E3 demos that were shown and are representative of actual game play under Half-Life 2.
We ran all cards at 1024x768, and the highest end cards at 1280x1024. We also used the best possible shader setting for the hardware, meaning that the R3x0 hardware used the DX9 code path, the 5900 Ultra used the NV3x code path and everything else used the DX8.x code path.
All tests were run without Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering enabled. Anti-Aliasing was not properly supported in this demo and thus wouldn't be representative of final game play.
We only tested with a 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro as a 256MB card wasn't available at the time (all of our 256MB cards were tied up in Athlon 64 testing). The performance difference between 128MB and 256MB is negligable; although time permitting, we may see some higher detail textures offered for 256MB card owners. We'll see what happens once the game ships though.
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Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
another thing i just noticed looking at the doom 3 and hl2 benchies.take a look at the performance of 9800pro and 9600pro...
in hl2, the 9800pro is about 27% ahead of the 9600pro, in doom 3 the 9800pro is near 50% faster than the 9600pro. the whole thing just feels weird.
enigma
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I'm surprised that Anand mentioned nothing about the comparisons between 4x2 and 8x1 pipelines? Does he even know that MS is working to included paired textures with simutainious wait states for the nV arcitexture? You see the DX9 SDK was developed thinking only one path and since each texture has a defined FIFO during the pass the second pipe in the nV is dormant until the first pipe FIFO operation is complete, with paired textures in the pipe using syncronus wait states this 'problem' will be greatly relieved.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
its fake.... HL2 test are not ready today , great fake Anandtech :)rogerw99 - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#28Ooo Ooo Ooo... I know the answer to that one.
It was Mrs. White, but it wasn't with the gun, it was the lead pipe.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
ATI The Way It Should Be PlayedAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Quote: 'So why is it that in the age of incredibly fast, absurdly powerful DirectX 9 hardware do we find it necessary to bicker about everything but the hardware? Because, for the most part, we've had absolutely nothing better to do with this hardware.'Don't we? Wrong!
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/pubs/multigridGPU/
;)
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
one thing that i think is kinda interesting. check out this benchmark hardocp did - fx5900 ultra vs. radeon 9800 pro in doom 3 (with help from id software).http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDc0LDE=
after reading this, read carmack's Jan 03 .plan, where he states that under the default openGL codepath, the fx architecture is about half as fast as the r300 - something that is pretty much resembled in the hl2 benchmarks. furthermore he states that using the default path the r300 is clearly superior (+100%), but when converting to vendor-specific codepaths, the fx series is the clear winner.
conclusions? none, but some possibilities
.) ati is better in directx, nvidia in opengl
.) id can actually code, valve cannot
.) and your usual conspiracy theories, feel free to use one you specifically like
bottom line. neither ati nor nvidia cards are the "right ones" at the moment, wait for the next generation of video cards and upgrade THEN.
enigma
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I'm so glad i converted to Ati, i have never regret it & now it feels even better. Ati rulesnotoriousformula - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
i'm sure Nvidia will strike back.. prolly with DOOM III..well till then i'll enjoy my little army of ATI cards: ATI 9800NP>PRO, ATI 9700, ATI 9600PRO :P..long live ATI!!! :DAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Anand should have benchmarked on a more widely used computer like a 2400 or 2500+ AMD. Who here has the money to buy a p4 3Gb 8000mhz FSB cpu?