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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ukDave - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Not that i'm saying that is the reason it performs so badly, it is due to its poor implementation of DX9.0. I think the whole nV 5xxx line needs to be swept under the carpet because i simply can't say anything nice about it :)ukDave - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Doom3 was optimized for nVidia, much like HL2 is for ATi.mattsaccount - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
How can a 5900 be so poor at dx9 style effects in HL2, and excel at an (arguably) more graphically intense game like Doom 3? The difference can't be due only to the AP (Dx vs OGL), can it?ZobarStyl - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Doh login post: FYI the bar graphs on page six are both the DX8 pathway.ZobarStyl - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Cybercat - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Good article. I'm a little disappointed in the 6200's performance though.thebluesgnr - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Hi!Have not read the article yet but I'd like to ask one thing:
The Radeon 9550 tested has 64-bit or 128-bit memory interface? From your numbers I'm sure it's 128-bit, but I think some people might order the cheapest (=64-bit) after reading the article, so it would be nice to see it mentioned.
On the same line, I would like to see AnandTech mention the GPU and memory clocks for all the video cards benchmarks.
btw, the X300SE was tested on a platform with the same processor as the other AGP cards, right?
Thank you.
shabby - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Holy crap my ti4600 can muster 60fps in hl2 ahahaha.skunkbuster - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
yikes! i feel sorry for those people using video cards that only support DX7.Pannenkoek - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
I wonder if "playability" is merely based on the average framerates of demos, or that somebody actually tried to play the game with an old card. Counter Strike became barely playable with less than 40 fps later in its life, while average framerates could be "good enough" and while it used to run smoothly at the same framerate in older versions.