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
A Pretty Decent DirectX 7
The second most popular Half Life 2 GPU according to Valve’s own statistics is the GeForce4 MX. As a quick refreshed, the GeForce4 MX is basically a GeForce2 MX with an updated memory controller, so its feature set will not be DirectX 8 compliant like the GeForce4, rather it is more of a DX7 part. So what do you lose if you’ve got an older card like a GeForce2, GeForce4 MX or original Radeon?
Of course the water quality in DX7 mode is similar to what we saw in DX8 mode, but there are much larger sacrifices made in DX7 mode.
For starters, features like bump mapping are gone, making the levels look significantly worse than when using the DX8 path. The screenshot below shows Valve’s DX8 path at work, mouse over to see what you lose by going to DX7:
Hold mouse over image to see DX7 mode
While you could argue that there’s not too big of a difference between DX9 and DX8 (other than the water), everything looks significantly worse in DX7 mode.
The other big change is that in DX7 mode the draw distances are significantly reduced, so what you notice are that certain objects will slowly fade in the closer you get to them. For example, staring into the distance we see nothing in front of the chain link fence:
Stepping forward we begin to see something faint fade in:
Moving in a little closer we see the green dumpster completely:
Another few steps and we see two more objects faintly appear:
A little further and we see two trashcans appear as well:
Running in DX7 mode does sacrifice quite a bit, but the game is extremely playable as you are about to see. If you have the ability to run in a higher quality mode then you definitely should, but what’s most important is that even in DX7 mode Half Life 2 looks better than any other DX7 title. At the same time Half Life 2 in DX7 mode runs and looks better than newer games on graphics hardware that’s now four years old. You can download all of the screenshots on this page in an uncompressed format here.
Let’s see how well the GeForce4 MX runs in DirectX 7 mode…
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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