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
How about a walk on the beach?
Just like in the original Half Life, Half Life 2's levels are split into multiple parts and are loaded as you encounter them in order to make the game flow more like a story rather than your average first person shooter. Our next benchmark is a continuation of the d2_coast levels: d2_coast_12.
This particular demo takes place on a beach during the early morning. In the demo, our player walks along the beach only to be ambushed by a few soldiers, which he mows through with ease. Here's where things get interesting though; one of the most stressful shaders in the entire game is located in the d2_coast_12 level. There are a couple of huts armed with machine guns placed on the beach, but to protect the operator of the gun there's a bit of protective glass much like a windshield at the front of the huts. The glass shaders end up severely reducing frame rate, although with all of the cards we have here the game is still playable.
Our player stares at the glass of one of these huts for a bit before moving on, finally coming across a couple of enemies in an elevated hut. The player fires a few rockets at the hut, which produce explosions that are also fairly GPU intensive, while being shot at from above. The demo closes with our player tossing a grenade at the enemy hut as a last resort.
We chose this level and section of the game for two reasons: 1) The GPU intensive glass shader we mentioned earlier intrigued us and slowed down even the fastest GPUs, and 2) the level had a lot of good combat which we were lacking from some of the other demos. Once again, you can see how this demo is also typical of Half Life 2 gameplay.
Once again, the standings remain virtually unchanged in this demo with the 9700 and 9600XT performing very well. The Radeon X300 and GeForce 6200 also perform very closely to one another here:
In DX8 mode there's more of the same, the 5900XT does pretty well as does the age old GeForce4:
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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.