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
The Slowest Level in the Game
For our fifth and final demo we turn to one of the last levels in the game – d3_c17_12. This city level takes place mostly outdoors and gave us the lowest average frame rates out of any level we played in during our testing of Half Life 2. A combination of all of the fire shaders as well as the explosions and weapon fire and the outdoor lighting make for one very stressful test.
Our player fires upon one of the mammoth mechanical spiders using a handful of weapons, including the RPG which in itself ends up being decently stressful on the GPU.
No real surprises here in our final benchmark:
Once again, we see very similar standings in this test under DX8:
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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.