Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Halo IQ
The long awaited PC port of Halo is DX9 based. We ran our benchmark using their built-in feature from the commandline (-timedemo -use20 -vidmode x,y,r). Unfortunately Halo does not currently support antialiasing so we are unable to bring you those numbers.
Of course, we have gotten plenty of emails pointing out the hack that allows AA to work with Halo. This involves adding a flag to tell Halo to DisableRenderTargets for your particular video card. The problem with this is that rendered textures are used all throughout the game, and many of the awesome PS2.0 effects are lost. Water effects disappear, walls go from dirty and grimy looking to plastic and shiny, and the image quality we get from the hack takes away too much to be worth it in our opinion.
NVIDIA 45.23 (click to see full image)
NVIDIA 52.14 (click to see full image)
ATI Catalyst 3.7 (click to see full image)
It is also nice to see that there isn't any image quality difference between NVIDIA and ATI cards with this game.
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
yea I agree with what #3 said..hardly any commentary on the IQ... and If I'm not mistaken, aren't the new cats going to be out tomorrow???? If so, you might as well do the whole thing over again...Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#3, go away you fanboy. There was absolutely no IQ difference between the CAT 3.7 and 52.14 drivers.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
i'm sure intel will be happy to hear that you 'upgraded' your prescott to an FX.dvinnen - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
errr, a lot of the piture links aren't wrking, like teh halo iq one and TR:AoDAnonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Um...Why was there nothing noting the difference between nVidia and ATI's in the IQ section? nVidia looks absolutely horrid compared to the ATI.
AgaBooga - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
I saw more opinions in this article leaning towards Nvidia, especially around the Tomb Raider benchmarks. More specifically, starting with the page regarding compilers. I liked this articles, but there could have been less opinionated viewpoints on this. Also, it might be better if we get names of authors with what they typed, so we know who typed what, because some of this sure didn't sound like something Mr. Shimpi has written in the past...Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
i'm still reading..............