Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Half-Life 2 Performance - e3_techdemo_5.dem
In our first test, we see that ATI holds an incredible lead over NVIDIA, with the Radeon 9800 Pro outscoring the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra by almost 70%. The Radeon 9600 Pro manages to come within 4% of NVIDIA's flagship, not bad for a ~$100 card.
Although it looks much worse than the other competitors, the GeForce4 Ti 4600 running in its DX8 code path manages to offer fairly decent frame rates - outperforming both of the mainstream FX parts. The Radeon 9200 has a good showing here, but exhibited a number of visual artifacts during the testing that could impact performance. So, we'll reserve judgement on that part until everything gets worked out between it and the game.
At 1280x1024, we're shading more pixels and thus the performance difference increases even further, with the 5900 Ultra being outperformed by 73% this time around.
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uturnsam - Friday, November 28, 2003 - link
#110 continuedNow I know why the guy behind the counter told me to steer clear of the ATI Radeon cards because of the known compatability problems when running games.
(Computer sales guy thinking-I just read the article in the AnandTech post)
Translated: I have a shit load of Nvidia cards and if I don't lie my ass off to my Customer's it will be game over for me!!!
The only reason I started looking at ATI cards was I decided to spend what I saved on the CRT monitor (over the $$LCD) for higher performer card. Mr $Sales$ had me convinced I would be buying an inferior card with ATI. Worth shopping around and scouring reviews :O)
uturnsam - Friday, November 28, 2003 - link
I was going to buy a Geforce5600 but looked at a 9600Pro today the thing is I was wondering if I should really blow the budget and lash out on a 9800Pro.I am so glad I came across this article I will stick with the 9600Pro, save some cash, sleep better at night and know when half life 2 is released I will be getting the best performance for the outlay.
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 16, 2003 - link
you can count on your 9500 being in between the 9800 and the 9600, about 30% frame rate above the 9600. the 4 pipelines will help.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
I would like to see a test of the dx8 paths on some of the really older cards for those of us who are too broke for these new ones!!For instance, I have a geforce2 GTS that I love very much and works just fine on everything else. I don't want to have to upgrade for one game.
Anonymous User - Sunday, September 21, 2003 - link
I would like to see how they compare with a 5900 using Detonator 44.03 driver. Yes I know its an older driver. But in my tests it provided higher benchmarcks than the 45.23 driver.Has any body else noticed this?
Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
So actually Nvidia shader(16/32) are notcomparable with ATI shader(24-ms dx9 standard)!
Too bad in a way or another they try to cheat
again and again.......
Very bad idea!
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 16, 2003 - link
#104, the benchmarks and anand's analysis show that hl2 is gpu power limited, not memory/fillrate limited... the 9600 will be limited more by that than by memory or fillrate.Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
I think #84 mentioned this, but I didn't see a reply. In the benches, the 9600 pro pulled the exact same (to within .1 fps, which could just be roundoff error) frame rates at 1024 and 1280.I don't think I've ever seen a card bump up res without taking a measurable hit (unless it was cpu-limited). In every other game, the 9600 takes a hit going from 1024 to 1280. And the 9700 and 9800 slow down when the resolution goes up, even though they're basically the same architecture. Someone screwed up, either the benchmarks or the graphs.
Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
#61 Did you take the time to see that valve limited their testing use. Anandtech had no say in all the tests because they were very time limited. Also, try to make coherent sentences.Anonymous User - Sunday, September 14, 2003 - link
It's not as if GIFs gobble bandwidth, I (as CAPTAIN DIALUP) don't even notice them loading. They're tiny. Even though I don't have trouble receiving this Flash stuff, it pisses me off, because sometimes the same scores will load for all the pages. Why not have a poll or something on this?