Valve's High Dynamic Range Explored
by Josh Venning on September 30, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Test Setup
While Call of Duty and the impressive-looking Call of Duty 2 are our current WW2 games of choice, Day of Defeat is a great Half life 2 mod, and with the recent release of Day of Defeat: Source by Valve, it's looking even better. Just in case you didn't already know, Day of Defeat is a multiplayer-only mod of the original Half life game, which has been out for quite a while. As with Counter Strike, Valve updated the mod to run on the Half life 2 engine, keeping the gameplay intact, but adding new physics and graphical elements, resulting in a much higher quality game.
The gameplay of Day of Defeat is much like counterstrike; fast-paced, first-person shooter action, only set in WW2 instead of present day. There are currently only four maps available and they are generally all close-quarter and set in urban areas. With the maximum limit of 16 players on each team combined with the small maps, the action can get very intense, and because of the realism factor (as with Counterstrike), you'll find yourself dying very quickly after just a couple of hits if you aren't careful. Fortunately though, unlike Counterstrike, you won't have to wait until the end of the round to respawn, which keeps the action going.
After we managed to record a demo of the game, we ran some benchmarks to see of the achieved framerates between different cards with different HDR settings. There are basically 3 different HDR settings: all HDR effects enabled, bloom only enabled (when available), and none. We tested all three of these settings on a total of six cards: 3 ATI and 3 NVIDIA cards. For ATI's, we chose the X850 XT, the X800 XT, and the X800. The NVIDIA parts that we used were the 7800 GTX, 7800 GT, and the 6600 GT. All of the tests were run at a resolution of 1600x1200 with no AA or AF.
Now, let's take a look at the performance tests.
While Call of Duty and the impressive-looking Call of Duty 2 are our current WW2 games of choice, Day of Defeat is a great Half life 2 mod, and with the recent release of Day of Defeat: Source by Valve, it's looking even better. Just in case you didn't already know, Day of Defeat is a multiplayer-only mod of the original Half life game, which has been out for quite a while. As with Counter Strike, Valve updated the mod to run on the Half life 2 engine, keeping the gameplay intact, but adding new physics and graphical elements, resulting in a much higher quality game.
The gameplay of Day of Defeat is much like counterstrike; fast-paced, first-person shooter action, only set in WW2 instead of present day. There are currently only four maps available and they are generally all close-quarter and set in urban areas. With the maximum limit of 16 players on each team combined with the small maps, the action can get very intense, and because of the realism factor (as with Counterstrike), you'll find yourself dying very quickly after just a couple of hits if you aren't careful. Fortunately though, unlike Counterstrike, you won't have to wait until the end of the round to respawn, which keeps the action going.
After we managed to record a demo of the game, we ran some benchmarks to see of the achieved framerates between different cards with different HDR settings. There are basically 3 different HDR settings: all HDR effects enabled, bloom only enabled (when available), and none. We tested all three of these settings on a total of six cards: 3 ATI and 3 NVIDIA cards. For ATI's, we chose the X850 XT, the X800 XT, and the X800. The NVIDIA parts that we used were the 7800 GTX, 7800 GT, and the 6600 GT. All of the tests were run at a resolution of 1600x1200 with no AA or AF.
Now, let's take a look at the performance tests.
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Frackal - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
I actually meant to ask about the resolution too.In my own bench, starting from spawn point at anzio and then running to the other end of the map while doing some shooting with the bazooka, at:
1680x1050
4AA/16AF All High/Reflect All
MultiSampling AA
Forced Trilinear mipmaps
I get just over 70FPS
4400+ @2.65
BFG GTX @ 480/1360
2gigs mushkin at 241 1:1 2/3/3/8
ashay - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
Is it just me? In EVERY screenshot of HDR vs !HDR that I've seen, I've thought the !HDR looks better. Maybe I need to play and see for my self.wanderer27 - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
I have yet to see where either Bloom or HDR makes things look better.AOE III - HDR/Bloom looks worse.
Day of Defeat - HDR/Bloom looks worse.
Oblivion - Bloom effect looks bad, haven't seen a shot of non-Bloom on this game yet.
Maybe it will do something for darkly lit games, but so far they all look too glowy (AOE), or washed out (DOD).
So far this looks like a useless technology they're trying to shove down our throats. Thankfully, in AOE you have the option to turn this crap off.
My advice to the Devs, stop wasting time on this and find something that'll actually make things look or play better.
overclockingoodness - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
The image with HDR is smoother.Frackal - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
Frankly I was blown away by the graphics in DOD-S and I've played COD2, FEAR, BF2, etc... If you're running the right rez with all details turned up, its like being in a photograph much of the time.Valve should have gotten way more props for this
I hope I don't have to see you guys exclaiming how good FEAR's crappy graphics are if you ever review that game..
Anyway I love AT but I thought this really downplayed the impressive graphics here.
Gigahertz19 - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
The very bottom image looks the best to me. Compare it to the top which has alot of the jaggies but witht he HDR the jaggies are missing, it looks alot smoother. Wish I had a better GPU then a 9700 pro.Bonesdad - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
All the jaggies are definately still there, the entire image is just more washed out...I think the top image has richer colors. Not really impressed, personally.toyota - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
all the jaggies are still there in the bottom pic. they are just a little washed out. its not any smoother.DerekWilson - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
We did top end and upper midrange ... this was really just a taste though -- believe me, we'll have more benchmarks with this game soon :-)PrinceGaz - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
Interesting article though like many others I was distinctly unimpressed by the static screenshots showing the "benefits" of HDR. Maybe it works a lot better while actually playing the game...The choice of cards tested seemed a bit strange to me though. Either a 7800GT or GTX would have been enough for top-end nVidia performance, as would a single good card from the X800/X850 line-up to show how ATI compares with their current generation (ideally figures from an X1800 would be thrown in, but NDAs currently prevent that). The omission of a 6800GT or similar was the main problem with the benchmarks though, as many of us have one of them and would like to know well they fare.
Along with the 6600GT for current mid-range performance, ideally you'd also include an FX5900/5950 series and a 9800Pro as not everyone buys a new card when a new generation of hardware is released. The 9800Pro is still very capable and should be included in all reviews, and an FX5900/5950 should be included too for reference even if it does suffer badly with modern pixel-sharder intensive games, so that people can decide if an upgrade is worthwhile. Anything less than those cards would probably be a waste of time for this review though as they'd be too slow.
In fact I'd say a 9800Pro and FX5900/5950 should be included in *all* graphics-card / game-performance reviews, in addition to the usual 7800, 6800, 6600, X800/850. You must have them lying around somewhere ready to drop in a suitable box I'm sure :)
I'm looking forward to the updated/follow-up article with additional benchmarks, I understand if time was pressing you could only test on a limited number of cards.