Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 2 - Mainstream DX8/DX9 Battle
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2004 6:35 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Battle in the Canal
Our first benchmark is packed full of just about all of the stressful elements you will encounter throughout Half Life 2. The demo starts aboard a boat driving in a tunnel before making a splash into a wide open body of water. The boat is piloted over to the shore where the player dismounts and heads inside for some action.
While inside the flashlight is used to illuminate dark areas and the player encounters a few firefights before heading upstairs to the outside. While outside (and while being pursued by a helicopter) the player encounters a few enemies on his way into a warehouse. The demo concludes inside the warehouse.
We created this demo because it incorporates just about everything – water, the flashlight, a vehicle, engaging enemies indoors as well as outdoors and sunlight. Since we’re dealing with all very capable cards here, let’s first look at performance at 1280 x 1024. Remember that we used the highest detail settings with the exception of anisotropic filtering and antialiasing, which were both disabled for this test (we will look at their impact on image quality/performance later on in this review).
We’ve already looked at the performance of the Radeon 9700 Pro and the Radeon 9800 Pro, those cards are only included so you have a way of tying the performance of these GPUs to the ones we compared in Part 1 (the numbers are comparable).
The non-Pro Radeon 9700 does very well, as does the Radeon 9600XT. If you look at the performance difference between the 9550 and the 9600XT you should have a good idea about how intermediate cards like the Radeon 9600 Pro should perform.
The GeForce FX 5900XT performs absolutely horribly here as you can expect.
The resolution scaling graph is particularly important here because not all of these cards are best suited for 1024 x 768. ATI’s Radeon X300 is particularly interested because it actually performs relatively well at 800 x 600 (as does its competitor – the GeForce 6200). Remember, we’re looking at DirectX 9 performance here and even the $80 X300 SE is playable at 800 x 600. Not bad at all.
Next up we look at DirectX 8 performance, for these graphs we’ve taken out the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro as you’d have no reason to run either of those cards in DX8 mode.
The Radeon 9700 and the 9600XT continue to do extremely well here but this time around, the GeForce FX 5900XT actually offers very solid performance. When Valve said that you should treat the FX series as DirectX 8 hardware, they weren’t kidding.
Owners of older GeForce4 cards should be pretty happy with DX8 performance as the Ti 4600 was quite playable in our at_canals_08 test.
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Lord Banshee - Monday, November 22, 2004 - link
Sorry about above post,#50, i hope you are only takinf about nv3x and below core? the nv4x core is almost as good as the newest radeon in rendering dx9 games.
On a side note does anybody care the reason why doom3 models and textures are as good as half-life2? One being the amount of GPU processing power the lighting system takes. And the special effects. I am sure if every body had a 6800 Ultra then ID would have made the textures in doom3 better and used more high polygon models.
But in we all don't so they instead used alot of normal mapping(the future in gameing) and a brand new light system never seen in games before.
But again you most see that the doom3 engine has the ability of using huge textures and models but it is game dependent. Not all games that will use this engine will have the same lighting effect and such, they might want to show off their texture skills, it is the game companies choice.
What doom3 fails at is outdoor enviroments, this is where the Source engine has them good (so they say, i have yet to play half-life 2)
But it looks like the Unreal3 engine will be the best of both worlds, but thats another 2 years most likly.
Lord Banshee - Monday, November 22, 2004 - link
nserra - Monday, November 22, 2004 - link
#40 T8000 ???!?!So why 6600 and 6800 perform very well and 6200 so bad? Aren’t they all the same card? Your post is pointless.
Luckily Valve was hacked?, are you kidding how many people including like my self buy a piece of crap like the 5600, that performs so bad no only on this game but many others. TOO BAD IT WAS HACKED!!!
Sure any card plays it today like one year ago, but not the right way!!!!
I don’t know but I bet when more DX9.0 games came out the difference between the Ati and nvidia will be bigger. Unless there will be an option to enable the fast FP16 mode providing lower image quality like Far Cry.
nserra - Monday, November 22, 2004 - link
We all know that who bought the Ati 9xxx have done a better job than the ones who bought the FX5xxx series card.Now what about an 8500 vs GF3/4.
And some 9000 card too?
DX8.1 is different of DX8.0, I would like to know if the 8500/9000 was a better buy, but today over the geforce3/4.
It’s really important since GFfx sucks today but not 2 years ago, who know what will happen 2 years from now with 9xxx and 6xxx.
Why 6200 performs so badly, and 6600 and 6800 so good?
dderidex - Monday, November 22, 2004 - link
FYI, the compare image on [L=this page]http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2281...[/L] for the water is all wrong. I don't know what they were using for the 'DX8' sample of the water reflection, but that's not what it looks like at all on a GeForce FX card. It looks virtually indistinguishable from the DX9 sample, only with noticeably less smooth transitions with the coastal terrain (not shown in that shot).Unless AT intentionally disabled world reflections when switching to DX8 mode? But, I have a hard time believing they would be so biased.
blckgrffn - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
8500/9100 & 9000/9200 & fx5200/5700 Radeon 7000/7500 & GF3/GF2 benches please! There are a lot of these cards out there and I am curious!TheRealSkywolf - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
45, ati contributed with a big cut of the budget for half life 2. Thats why it got delayed 1 year.So it is blatant obbious that valve was told to not not make dx 9.0 work well for nvidia fx.
moletus - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
#40, you are so wrong wrong and wrong again. What kinda idiot game developer woulnt code as good as possible, regards of who gave em what development money? There are plenty of nvidia cards out there and im quite sure they want to play HL2 too.It's all about making $$$, so...
Cybercat - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
#40, not necessarily. The 6200 is typically found to perform close to the X300. Only a few times will it meet up with the X600 Pro's standards.http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2238&...
abakshi - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
*other (not over lol)