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
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.
There are no surprises in DX9 mode, the 9700 and 9600XT continue to be the top performers out of this roundup. The 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro are obviously the faster cards but they were also in a much different price class upon their release.
Now on to DX8 performance:
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klah - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
"cant wait for CPU benches"Check out these:
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/half_life_2_cp...
KevinCQU - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
#17, I'm running the game on a regular GF3, AXP2500+ @2.2 and 512 ram. It runs smoothly at directx8 settings, I turned down the water quality though, havent tried turning it up yet, been busy playing the game ;) I'm impressed though....its definitely playable at 1024 and it looks pretty nice too-Kevin
ksherman - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
#17, im probably gonna try and run the game (GF2 TI200, but OCed to Ti400 speeds ;), so ill let you know if itll work...ksherman - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
dumbish question--> i i wanna play in DX7 or 8 mode, do i need to install different driers, or do i just use the ingmae settings? I dont actually own the game yet, so thats why i ask...kmmatney - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
I can't believe how much better DirectX looks compared to OpenGL. Seems like Id made the wrong choice...GonzoDaGr8 - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Aaargh..Has anyone ran this game yet on a Geforce3(regular/Ti200/Ti500) based card yet? I'm curious as I have a Ti200 and could run this is DX8 mode..skiboysteve - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
#13 is exactly rightits not all OpenGL vs DX or nvidia optimization to ati optimization.
look back at anands article about the graphics pipeline on each of these cards. Doom3 was extremly texture intensive, doing allot of lookup to tables instead of doing the math.
nv30 and nv40 are very good at doing texture look ups, and only the nv40 is good at the math. nv30 had a very non math friendly pipeline.
the r300-r400 were better at math.
its all in the articles on this very website.
bupkus - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
I have a Ti4200 w/ 64MB ram and I changed from 1024x768 to 800x600 to fix some occasional stutter problems; it didn't help.Which res should I probably be able to run in. I have a 2500+ Barton OC'd to 2.2GHz with 2x256 OCZ PC3500 EL.
Just for fun, I went to 1280x1024 for my LCD just to see how it would look (without movement) and it was very nice.
skunkbuster - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
also, nvidia is known to be better at openGl games and weaker in games that use dx.the same as ati is known to be better at dx games, and weaker in openGl games.
doom3= open gl
Falloutboy - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
#10 its because Doom 3 was very texture intensive based, which the 5xxx series of nvidia exceled at and HL2 is a very shader intensive engine wit hless emphasis on texutures, and as we all know by now the 5xxx series sucked in DX9 shaders