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
DirectX 9 Performance Impact
Now that you've seen what improvements Half Life 2's DX9 path can give you, let's take a look at the price to pay for some of those impressive visual effects. In order to measure the impact of the DX9 path we did the following: ran benchmarks using both the DX8 and DX9 paths, then took the percentage decrease in performance seen by going to DX9. We then averaged the percentage decrease across all five of our custom Half Life 2 benchmarks, per card, per resolution. We will look at actual performance numbers shortly, but this is just to give you an idea of what's to come:
At 800 x 600 the game is mostly CPU bound on cards like the Radeon 9600XT, thus the performance drom from DX8 to DX9 is quite small. Even on cards like the X300 and the Radeon 9550 the performance hit isn't too bad at less than 20%. But here's the kicker, the GeForce 5900XT sees almost a 60% drop in performance by going to DX9 mode. This type of a performance drop should be relatively consistent across the entire NV3x line (e.g. FX 5900 Ultra, FX 5600, etc...).
At 1024 x 768 now all of the GPUs are in double digit performance losses, but even the GeForce 6200 with its 25% performance hit is nothing compared to the 5900XT which incurrs a 65% performance hit when going to DX9.
At 1280 x 1024 things get just a little worse, but you should get the picture by now - the GeForce FX line does not perform well as a DX9 part under Half Life 2.
You will undoubtedly see these statistics reflected in the actual performance of the 5900XT in the coming pages, but basically if you are a NV3x GPU owner you will want to run Half Life 2 in DX8 mode and not DX9 mode.
Now let's take a look at how the rest of the GPUs perform in both DX8 and DX9 modes. For these tests we used the exact same drivers and platforms as our first article, just with different video cards so the numbers are comparable.
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abakshi - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Just a note - the last graph on page 7 seems to be a bit messed up -- the GeForce 6200 is shown as 82.3 FPS - higher than all of the over cards - while the data chart and line graph show it as 53.9 FPS.KrikU - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Why cant we see benchmarks with AA & AF enabled with mainstream graphics cards? HL2 is using a such engine that is only CPU limited, so AA & AF tests are really welcome!Im playing with ti4400 (o/c to ti4600 speeds) with AA 2x & AF 2x! This is first such new game where I can use these image quality enhancements with my card!
T8000 - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Half life 2 seems to be designed around the Radeon 9700.Because Valve seems to have made certain promises to ATI, they where not allowed to optimize any Geforce for DX9.
This also shows with the GF6200, that should be close to the R9600, but is not, due to the optimized Radeon 9700 codepath.
Luckely, Valve was hacked, preventing this game from messing up the marketplace. Now, almost any card can play it and Nvidia may even be tempted to release a patch in their driver to undo Valves DX9 R9700 cheats and make the game do DX9 the right way for FX owners, without sacrificing any image quality. Just to prove Valve wrong.
draazeejs - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Well, I like HL2 a lot, much more so than the pitch-black, ugly-fuzzy texture D3. But, honestly - to me it looks exactly like Far Cry, engine-wise. Is there any difference?Respect to the level-designers of HL2, none of the games comes even close nowadays to that sort of detail and scenery. Also I think the physics of the people and faces and AI is by far superior. And the Raven-yard is much more scary than the whole D3 :)))
kmmatney - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
[sarcasm] Oh, and have fun running those DX games on other platforms without emulation. [/sarcasm]Obviously, this game isn't meant for other platforms, and that's fine by me. I think the original half-life had an OpenGL option, but it sucked (at least on my old Radeon card). In general, OpenGL has always been a pain, dating back to the old miniGL driver days. In my experience, when playing games that had either a Dx or OpenGL option, the DX option has usually been more reliable. It sould be because I usually have ATI based cards...
kmmatney - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
I didn't mean that DX literally "looks" better than OpenGl, I meant that it seems to be more versatile. Here's a game that can be played comfortably over several generations of video cards. You have to buy a new one to play D3 at decent resolution. The HL2 engine seems to have room to spare in terms of using DX 9 features, so the engine can be further enhanced in the future. I would think this game engine would be preferred over the Doom3 engine.oneils - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
#15, Steam's site (under "updates") indicates that the stuttering is due to a sound problem, and that they are working on a fix. Hopefully this will help you.vladik007 - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
" I'm missing words to how pathetic that is. "1st my post was no.2 NOT no.3.
2nd unlike many people i dont have time to work on my personal computers all the time. IF i dont upgrade this holliday season , i'll possibly have to wait until summer vacation. And you dont see nforce4 out now , do you ?
3rd No it's not pathetic to follow something that's never failed me. Ever heard of satisfied customer ? Well Abit has always treated me very well , RMA proccess , crossshiping , bios updates , good support on official forums ... etc Why on earth should i change ?
4th got it ?
moletus - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
I really would like to see some ATI 8500-9200 results too..Pannenkoek - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
#18: It depends on what features of the videocards are used for how a game will look like, and the art. It's not dirct3d vs opengl, the videocards are the limiting factor. Doom III is just too dark, and that's because of an optimization used in the shadowing. ;-)#26: Surely you mean "#2", I'm all for AMD. Not that my current computer is not pathetic compared with what's around nowadays...