Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 1 - DirectX 9 Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 17, 2004 11:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
In Jail, with Friends
Our Prison demo features a level that was a part of an older Half Life 2 showcase a year or so ago. In this indoor level, a group of spider-like-creatures help our player fend off a large group of soldiers as well as automated gun turrets.
There is a lot of gunfire in this level which makes this indoor level more GPU bound than it would have otherwise been. Since Gordon doesn’t have a flashlight at this point in the game, we didn’t use it during our recording of the demo. Despite the lack of flashlight and the fact that it’s an indoor level, we found that this demo was decently GPU bound.
The firing effects of the turrets are just beautiful
Once again we have the X800 XT at the top of the charts, with a 5% performance advantage over NVIDIA’s 6800 Ultra. The 6800GT holds a similar 5% advantage over the X800 Pro.
In the $200 - $300 range we once again see basically no difference between the 6800, 6600GT and the X700 XT.
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araczynski - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
yawn, i'm too busy enjoy the game (6800gt) to read the article and/or care which card is better :) i'm playing at 1600x1200 0AA/4AF (2.4@3.3/1GB) and have absolutely no complaints, other then knowing that the game will eventually end :(Jeff7181 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
#57... poorly :)blckgrffn - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
I would also like to to see how the 9200/9000 series Radeons perform too, and if you have extra time, the 8500/9100.Again, Thanks!
Jeff7181 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
#16... that's correct, although the only REAL observation that needs to be made is that Half Life 2 makes heavy use of pixel shaders which is very GPU dependant, and GPU's are just now growing the required testicles to process those shaders :)blckgrffn - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
Anand -I would like to see how the 6600 performs. As an 8 pipe card, it should perform better than the 9600xt and a little under a 9700 Pro, but it would be interesting to see if that is true. It is a great budget PCIe card along with the x700.
Thanks!
Nat
eva2000 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
nice review downloaded your demos to run on AMD64 3700+ @ 12x 222 = 2664mhz with 1GB BH-5 @ 222mhz 2-2-2-6 1T and Powercolor X800XT PE @ 520/560 and all demo results were within 3-4fps of the reviews :)Live - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
Good reading as always. Would like to see minimum FPS tough. I find it very important to see how low the cards drop when stressed. You can't see that with only average FPS.housecat - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
So... wheres the Nvidia SLI versus ATI results??Muwahahaha.
Avalon - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
Hey Anand, I have an interesting request. Could you try Rivatuner on your 6800, unlock its pipes, and then bench it again? :PJust kidding. Actually, I'm glad you've confirmed what I've been thinking...that AF hasn't been doing much for me. Since I'm running on a lowly 9700, I think I'll just turn it off now, and enjoy a nice speed boost.
PrinceGaz - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
How about throwing a GF 5600 and maybe even a GF 5200 in as well for part 2, as an awful lot of people have them. Ultra versions of either if you prefer.I don't have one of them myself as I'm still using a Ti4200, but it would be interesting to see how they stacked up in the DX8 codepath against the Ti4600 you are planning to test. And it should be worth a giggle to see just how "fast" the 5600 or 5200 can manage the DX9 codepath :)
Thanks to the resolution scaling-graphs this review included and how the fastest cards were generally CPU limited with that A64 4000+ when the resolution was dropped to 1024x768, I'm not sure how much a CPU scaling article for part 3 will show that can't already be quite accurately guesstimated from how different CPUs generally tend to perform in games. But a comparison of the Athlon 64 4000+, against an Athlon XP, a Prescott, a Northwood, and if time permits a fast P3, Duron and Celeron also, would be great.